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Comment by oarabbus_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if you mean this seriously, or in an exasperated but joking manner.

If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders.

To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.

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Twitter stock 2013-2020 [1] vs. S&P 500 [2] supports your claim. My take is its a combination of political divisiveness in the US alongside larger influences (i.e. Trump) inflating audiences / ad. revenue.

[1]:https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/stock...

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2488/sp500-10-year-daily-chart

Maybe...

I saw it posted somewhere that because 80m people follow Trump, he sways the monthly actives... but there are others with more followers than Trump.

I don't think there is enough evidence of his impact to the stock price.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

That made my curious about what Twitter accounts have the most followers. The top 10 are [1]:

1. Barack Obama, 118 million.

2. Justin Bieber, 111.

3. Katy Perry, 108.

4. Rihanna, 96.

5. Taylor Swift, 86.

6. Christiano Ronoldy, 84.

7. Lady Gaga, 81.

8. Donald Trump, 80.

9. Ellen DeGeneres, 80.

10. Ariana Grande, 74.

The next highest politican is Indian Prime Minister Modi, at #17 with 57 million. The Office of the Prime Minister of India is at #42, with 35 million. Obama, Trump, and Modi are the only politicians in the top 50.

The only individuals in the top 50 who are not those three or entertainers (counting athletes as entertainers) are Bill Gates at #22 with 50 million and Elon Musk at 47 with 34 million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

They might have more followers, but I'd be interested in seeing that in relation to how often those accounts tweet (tweets per year?).

Obama has a huge advantage over Trump and Modi. When you make a new account, Twitter normally suggests following Obama. That gets him followers for zero effort. On the other hand, new accounts that immediately follow a bunch of people like Trump get hit with random annoying account restrictions that might cause a person to hesitate or even delete their account.

Followers are largely irrelevant, here. Trump's tweets are cited on a weekly basis by hundreds of publications globally. More people view trump tweets not-on-Twitter than on the platform.

Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.

This is obviously not true; Twitter was widely used long before Trump and the vast majority of the current user base does not follow Trump at all.

>This is obviously not true;

Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.

It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.

> Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people

I think you vastly overestimate the number of extremely online politics people who pay close attention to Trump's tweets. People use Twitter to follow their friends and celebrities, not because of Trump. Only a minuscule fraction of the attention that Twitter receives is attributable to him.

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