Twitter’s
Trump ban is even more important than you thought
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 18, 2021 at 11:58 a.m. CST
The silence is
remarkable.
For all that’s happening
— President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, the threat of right-wing violence,
the coronavirus death toll approaching 400,000 — the loudest
voice in American life for the past five years has been reduced to a
whisper. President Trump is not on Twitter.
On Jan. 8, Twitter’s
leadership finally decided that it had had enough of Trump using the platform
to spread lies and incite violence and barred him from the service.
According to a new
Post/ABC News poll,
58 percent of the public supported the move (though that includes 91 percent of
Democrats and only 16 percent of Republicans).
But the magnitude of
that decision still hasn’t been fully appreciated. The fact that this one
social media company decided to shut down this one account might have
completely reshaped American politics for the coming few years.
Until 10 days ago,
nearly everyone assumed that Trump would be in a unique place for a defeated
ex-president, retaining a hold on his party’s base that would make him the axis
around which the Republican world revolved.
His opinions would
shape the party’s approach to Biden’s presidency. He would make or break
Republican officeholders, depending on their loyalty to him. Everyone within
the party — especially those who want to run for president themselves in 2024 —
would have to grovel before him, just as they have for so long. The GOP would
still be Trump’s party, in nearly every sense.
But not anymore.
As much as we’ve
talked about Trump’s tweets for all these years, if anything we might have
underestimated how central Twitter was to his power. Without it — especially as
an ex-president — he’ll be like Samson without his hair, all his strength taken
from him.
Twitter was so
important to Trump, according to Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at
the Hussman School of Journalism and Media of the University of North Carolina,
because of a few critical features of the platform itself and who uses it.
First, “Twitter is
the space for political and media elites,” McGregor told me. Facebook has many
more users, but journalists are on Twitter constantly, which means that when
Trump spoke there, he was speaking to them.
So even if Facebook
lets Trump back on (it, too, banned him, but so far only through
the inauguration), that won’t give him the ability to send a missive and then
sit back as one news organization after another runs stories about it,
multiplying its effects. “Whatever he said on Twitter ended up on the news,”
McGregor said. According to research McGregor conducted but hasn’t yet
published, when President Barack Obama tweeted during his second term, 3
percent of the time the tweet would find its way into a news story. The figure
for Trump’s tweets during his term was 65 percent.
Second, the platform
provided him a place to speak uncontested. He could say whatever he wanted
without being challenged, at least in the moment.
Third, his Twitter
presence enabled him to constantly reinforce an affinity between himself and
his supporters by speaking to them not only about politics but also about
plenty of other topics.
Trump connected with
them “because he was so genuinely himself, for better and for worse, on
Twitter,” McGregor told me. They identified with his opinions about everything,
whether it was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the merits of KFC or the latest
celebrity scandal.
“That’s the reason
influencers of all stripes are successful, because of that sense of intimacy”
that social media can create, McGregor said. And because Twitter is so reactive,
“it allowed people to make that connection between him and themselves” as they
responded to the news together.
When he’s not
president, Trump will have means of speaking to the public — he can call in to
“Fox & Friends,” for instance — but he won’t be surrounded by reporters
waiting to write down his every word, so he’ll have to work harder to get the
attention of the press.
Without Twitter, he
won’t be able to speak to his people on an hourly basis, maintaining that
affinity and crowding out the other Republicans who might compete for their
affection.
He could go to some
upstart conservative social media platform, like Gab or Parler (if it
gets restored).
But those don’t have the mainstream legitimacy he craves, and reporters aren’t
on them, so their reach is much more limited.
That means that when
new events occur, Trump won’t be able to make himself the core of the story. He
won’t be able to constantly remind Republicans that they need to fear him.
While many of his supporters will remain loyal, others will drift away, not
turning against him but just no longer thinking about him every day.
That will create a
vacuum into which other Republicans can move as they position themselves for
2024, not because they’re such Twitter ninjas themselves, but because space
will have been created for something more like a normal, non-Trump presidential
nominating contest.
There are profound
questions about the role social media now plays in our political process. I
agree both with those
who argue that
Twitter banning Trump was long overdue (his account was the single most
important nexus
of misinformation on the entire platform) and that it’s deeply troubling that a
private company has this much power.
But, for now, it
does. And so one company’s decision to finally say no to a president who used
it to inject poison into the American political bloodstream for years has
remade the future of the Republican Party, and perhaps the whole country.
Trump will still play
a role in his party and in our politics; we won’t shake off this horrific
presidency so easily. But that blissful quiet, as we no longer have him
shouting in our ears every day? We could get used to that.