Without Twitter, Trump Is Left To Write Tweets He Would Have Said On Paper

Say That Again

from the that's-so-pathetic dept

With both Twitter and Facebook banning Donald Trump’s account last month, after he inspired a mob of goons to ransack the Capitol, there has been something of an eerie quiet in the world. Having spent years making sure that every one of his often disconnected-from-reality tweets makes headlines or ruins many peoples’ days, the sudden quiet has been kind of odd.

Many people have wondered why he hasn’t gone elsewhere. While Parler is still down (but expected to return soon), many were surprised that Trump never used it, since his base basically adopted it as their own. However, late last week it was revealed that the Trump Organization had been negotiating (while Trump was President) with Parler for him to first take a huge equity ownership stake in Parler before joining the platform. For whatever reasons the agreement did not materialize.

However, a Daily Beast article, mostly about Trump’s views on Liz Cheney, drops a little hint about how Trump has been dealing with his inability to tweet: he’s writing out what he would have tweeted on paper and hoping someone else will tweet it for him:

But due to Twitter?s banning of the @realDonaldTrump account following the Capitol riot that Trump instigated, he has not been able to personally trash Cheney via his once widely read tweets. He has written out insults and observations, several of them about Cheney, but with no ability to tweet them himself, he has resorted to suggesting put-downs for others to use or post to their own Twitter, according to a person with direct knowledge of this new habit.

This is… just incredibly pathetic.

But it’s also a combination of weird and a little fascinating. The simple fact is that Trump could easily post these little thoughts online. It would not be difficult for his team to set up a personal webpage that would host these tweets — which would easily get plenty of attention (perhaps not as much and not as immediately as tweets, but still way more than most people). There’s even code out there he could make use of to effectively set up his own mini-Twitter, where it was just him posting his thoughts.

But he doesn’t do that. He just writes them out where no one but the people around him can see them. I’m not entirely sure what it means, but one possibility is that the thing he liked most about Twitter was not so much the ability to speak, but the audience it guaranteed. At the very least, that’s interesting to think about, considering that we tend to view the use of these platforms more about our ability to speak, and less about our ability to have reach for that speech.

Either way, take some solace in the fact that while most of us can continue to tweet, the former President is sitting around with a sharpie and a piece of paper, analog tweeting into nothingness.

Filed Under: bans, content moderation, donald trump, social media
Companies: parler, twitter