Trump was banned for a political interpretation of things that weren't happening on the platforms he was banned from. The topic of Trump's communication is intimately tied to the politics of the big tech companies.
What should not be allowed is a president attempting a coup by asking his supporters to attack the seat of our government to try to overturn an election he lost, using obvious lies and propaganda. Oh wait in fact it is not allowed as per our constitution!
He was de platformed for that, not for his politics.
This seems like it's pretty directly tied to Big Tech's control of what's allowed to be said on their platforms - as I understand it Trump set this up after he was banned from Big Tech as a way to try to get the message out, similar to the standard HN refrain that it's not a big deal because people can just set up their own websites. This seems to show just how ineffective that is in reality even for the aggressively populist previous president of the US and how important Big Tech's control over the political narrative actually is.
It also hurts that Fox News, the most popular news channel, is owned by his political opponent in the conservative field.
All other news channels spent the last 4 years barred from even attending his press conferences so they can’t be on his side.
Finally, he spent his last weeks of his presidency alienating his most hardcore supporters (e.g. the proud boys, parlor). Had he thrown them the smallest of bones then they might still be on his side rather than feeling betrayed as they do today.
Basically all this show is if you aggressively shoot yourself in the foot, don’t be surprised to find you now have no foot.
I'd be interested to know more about what type of content Trump published on his own blog, that proved unsuccessful. As someone observing from the UK, my assumption is that it was probably more long-form content. I wonder if comments were even possible. It wouldn't surprise me if short chunks of content, such as tweets, were far more popular with Trump's base than longer articles.
Edit: I see there are what I assume to be a couple of examples from his blog. They look very much like individual tweets. This turns it into quite an interesting case, one of a handful of examples I've seen where someone publishes the equivalent of their own twitter stream, on their own site. I used to have a great example, but I can't for the life of me now find it! In the case I've seen previously, the content was syndicated from the site to twitter — obviously, Trump doesn't have that option.
Agreed. Facebook's handling of the "fringe conspiracy theory" that COVID may have originated in a lab says everything we need to know about how destructive of a force for they have become.
I’m curious because I read the article and couldn’t find the instance of “big tech playing politics” you are talking about.