Trump's blog isn't lighting up internet, showing effectiveness of deplatforming | Hacker News Reader

Trump's blog isn't lighting up internet, showing effectiveness of deplatforming

nbcnews.com

32 pointskvee58 comments

> effectiveness of deplatforming

... or the danger of giving unelected, unaccountable ideologues this much power over elements of our actual government.

Sorry, what's the "danger" here? He's still doing press conferences and the Republican party is still actively cancelling members who dare to disagree with him. Folks on Fox, one of the most mainstream media companies, still refer to him as the president. For being deplatformed, he's sure got helluva platform.

Bush and Obama are still called Mr. President by some people.

See https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/47505/what-is-t...

Yes, and it's appropriate to address Trump with the same honorific. But referring to him in present tense as "the president" is quite different than addressing him as "Mr. President", and it's the former that raises an eyebrow

Curiously, your link suggests that Trump liked people calling him Mr. Trump even while he was president, where that was seen as passive aggressive when done to Bush II.

Which is it that they’re actually doing? Do you have evidence to show that?

I don't at all see how making it slightly more inconvenient to see what a politician thinks is remotely a danger to your government.

25 years ago this wasn't an option at all. Now you get to see what he thinks any time you like, just by pressing a few buttons

This is an extremely interesting point. One could argue that the degree to which one is "platformed" is relative to the rest of society, but it's also inescapably true that if you wind the clock back 50, 100, 200 years, the level of platform someone like a presidential candidate had, was spectacularly lower.

It's weird how people are still acting as if Donald Trump has been effectively erased from existence by the all-powerful, Orwellian jackboot of the deplatformers, when here we all are in a thread whose OP is an article by NBC News covering his weblog.

I mean... we're all supposed to be terrified of the example that's been made of Trump but he seems to be doing just fine.

>this much power

... or the power that's been building for twenty years without a peep from right-leaning people who all of a sudden care about this topic because it finally affects them

What actual government do these carefully-unnamed ideologues have power over, exactly?

Unelected?

I don’t think the comment is in reference to Trump, it’s in reference to social media platforms.

No way this could possibly come back to bite people at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Nope.

No way you can imagine it's happened and is still happening to people at the opposite end of the spectrum either, it seems?

What bite - will they be given their own blogs too?

The anti-imperial, Communist-leaning, anti-war Left has been de-platformed a lot through the ages though. So its been biting that segment of the Left for a long long time.

>The anti-imperial, Communist-leaning, anti-war Left

If I'm interpreting correctly, either you mean the group of people who are all of those things, or anyone on the left who is one or more of those things.

If you mean the former, then you mean a very small group of people. Very small. No one is a communist these days. People who are aren't even necessarily anti-war, or anti-imperial. The group of people is so small it's not even really worth commenting on for such a macro issue

If you mean the latter, then you're lumping a very large, very diverse group of people together. So diverse that there's very little point commenting on their collective views

I meant various strains of anti-war/Communist-leaning (specifically,Marx)/anti-imperial views across countries through the late 1800s to the late 20th century have been deplatformed (be it newspaper bans or other restrictions on speech). As for not mentioning this sentence in a macro-issue, my point is to rather look at it in a time-frame of a century or more, and argue that "deplatforming" has hit multiple shades of the political spectrum in the long run.

If people on the opposite side of the spectrum start acting like trump, I’ll advocate for them to be deplatformed, too. Until then, Trump’s blog is where he belongs.

Sure, but like it or not, Trump also happens to be yesterday's news for a lot of people. He still might have a very dedicated fan base, and not being on the largest platforms that now serve as portals to direct people to almost everything they encounter online certainly might hurt, but it's also possible that a lot of this is organic.

It's a chicken and egg problem. I'm certain being shut-out of every major platform lead to much fewer people actively seeking out his commentary.

Consider the following.

Trump's blog isn't lighting up the internet, because Trump is no longer relevant. He's no longer "leader of the free world," and his words no longer matter. The man is nothing but an angry, delusional old sociopath raging into the void. The country has moved on from him and his bullshit.

>The country has moved on from him and his bullshit.

oh I wish that was the case. People may not care about the person, but the "ideals" (whatever those are. Something about walls?) will likely be something that will haunt us for the next few decades.

EDIT: looking it up, I guess even wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpism

It doesn't have an RSS feed and it's presumably banned from the sites he got deplatformed from, so how is anyone supposed to follow it?

If bookmarking his site or pressing F5 occasionally is more effort than the content is worth, maybe that tells you something.

When I went to the page it asked me if I wanted to sign up for the mailing list

Many of us remember a time when there was no RSS and there were no social media sites, and we all still somehow managed to read blogs :)

isn't there some new twitter account vowing to post links to new posts (as should be standard)? I don't want to look for it heh

There was, but it got suspended: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57018148

I'm perfectly fine with banning Trump, but I'm really unsure how I feel about this. Some random accounts being banned for linking off-site seem extremely harmless and sets up some dangerous precedence for "ban evasion" IMO.

TFA is unclear about the url. Is this the blog they are talking about? https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

> Trump’s new blog has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before the ban, a single Trump tweet was typically liked and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times

Here's the blog:

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

I think the recycled content, partisan grandstanding, and constant use of meaningless adjectives might have something to do with it as well.

It's boring and poorly-written.

I wouldn't call it boring. Deluded to the point of hilarity I'd say.

From 2:45 today:

>When I was in office we were known as the Peace Presidency

By whom?! I'm not sure even his supporters would agree with that

> I think the recycled content, partisan grandstanding, and constant use of meaningless adjectives might have something to do with it as well.

Seriously, I get that he's trying to pander to his base but I checked his blog once and the most recent post was repeating the same baseless allegations about voter fraud that he had been making on Twitter up until the day he was banned. Good riddance.

As much as I dislike Trump, I can't say I'm very happy seeing censorship celebrated.

Of course these private companies are allowed to do whatever they want, but silencing speech in what has effectively become a public forum doesn't help us treat the underlying cause of what caused Trump to become popular in the first place (IMHO the thing that we really need to address as a country).

You break the rules; you suffer the consequences. He incited a riot; he lost his platform.

Banning him doesn't fix our country, sure, but social media platforms enforcing a basic standard of conduct seems like a positive to me.

>He incited a riot

I wasn't aware of that. Do you have a source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St...

If only sealions could use Google :(

I know how to use Google, but can't find a real source for that. Please share if you have any :)

s/can't/don't want to/

FTFY

I know what I wrote.

Was it a tweet or something? A video? I honestly can't find it.

If it's so easy for you just link me to the source and stop behaving like a child.

I'm stringing you along because I don't believe you are acting in good faith.

You seriously didn't pay any attention to any news during the US election ratification process? You didn't pay any attention to the second impeachment of Trump that focused solely on this matter? You didn't listen to any of his speeches around the new year? You couldn't type "donald trump incite riot" into a search engine and sift through some of the 600,000+ results?

Either you are very bad at Google and pay no attention to news, neither of which seems very likely given the website we're on, or you are sealioning.

So, which is it?

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

if I knew how to report comments on this site, I would even if I somewhat agree with this. I don't want this place becoming Reddit.

With all due respect: I don't think it's productive on the internet (a worldwide mechanism) to assume everyone is American, and by extension in tune with American politics. Or heck, even a person constantly checking social media for news multiple times a day. Name calling while ignoring these factors doesn't make for civil discourse.

Just take 5 seconds link to the wiki and then decide whether or not to disengage based on their response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St...

Thanks johnnyanmac, I was going to reply to cmsj but it was not worth the effort.

As you guessed correctly I am not from the US neither live there. It may be hard to believe for some "americans", but I wasn't following the latest US presidential election in detail, should I apologize for that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?

Thanks for the linked article, the only I was getting on Google were stuff from sites like tabloids; me being diligent, wanted to find a more reliable source.

Glad I could help, I never want to punish curiosity (especially in an age where someone in the know can find a source in seconds). I don't like linking to Wikipedia, especially when asked about recent controversial events (where plenty of other biases and internal civil wars occur over that information). But it's a better (and frankly faster) gesture than assuming bad faith with a commenter.

If I really wanted to be thorough, I'd at least skim through the listed sources and link what I felt was the most credible and impartial source.

fwiw I'm neither American, nor in the US either (or even on that entire continent).

I apologise and retract my cynicism about your posts. They were consistent with a particular type of troll, but I didn't attempt to dig into that before being snarky with you.

Isn’t this a demonstrate he isn’t censored? He’s literally one browser tab away, and yet even that was too much for his followers.

I think this is more effective as a demonstration of how users of these sites only function within these sites.

I feel the same - it may be perfectly legal for them to censor him, but it's nothing to celebrate, support, or be happy about.

> but silencing speech in what has effectively become a public forum doesn't help us treat the underlying cause of what caused Trump to become popular in the first place (IMHO the thing that we really need to address as a country).

Trump wasn't deplatformed because he was popular, he was deplatformed because he went batshit insane and tried to undermine the legitimacy of the election by spreading conspiracy theories and lies which led to a riot and attempted coup. If he'd been left alone, his rhetoric would have amplified the atmosphere of paranoia and violence. He was left alone for nearly four years across all of social media, even treated with a much lighter hand than anyone else, bit there's a limit, even for the President of the United States.

As far as addressing what caused Trump to become popular, you're right - deplatforming Trump didn't address that, nor could it have, nor was it intended to. I believe it did keep a bad situation from spiraling out of control, so it was the correct decision in that regard.

Twitter shouldn't be the public forum, and that may be a long-term positive effect of all this. Maybe real competitors to Facebook and Twitter will eventually grow out of this.

People en masse may rediscover blogs, forums, and such and realize there is a world outside of social media walled gardens.

Hopefully that world doesn't just consist of nothing but pro-Trump or political sites and forums.

Who wants to read some crummy blog? He once threatened to make a platform to rival twitter's. Instead, he built himself a soapbox. Social media success is tied to engagement. A soapbox is antithetical to that.

Gab was poorly executed, but they had plenty of engagement with people who were "deplatformed" elsewhere. This doesn't show the effectiveness of deplatforming, it shows Trump's lack of vision

> He once threatened to make a platform to rival twitter's.

True but 1) he's hardly going to code it himself and 2) he's fundamentally not a details or follow-through person. Promises, bluster and threats are his forte. That and bankruptcies.

On the other hand, he's a billionaire, and he could credibly promise to pay for something better-provisioned than Gab long enough for it to be built. He's not known to pay such bills, but people do keep falling for it...

> On the other hand, he's a billionaire,

So he keeps saying. And somehow people keep taking that at face value, despite the "not known to pay such bills" part.

Any social network tied to Donald Trump's name would be a PR disaster because you'd end up with a ton of trolls on it and every controversial post, big or small, serious or not, would be something his opponents would demand he disavow. But strict moderation would also defeat the purpose of the site and alienate his base. So I think the ultimate choice was to have a social network of one person - a blog page on his website. And that's his "platform" now.

> So I think the ultimate choice was to have a social network of one person

Something centred on exactly one person is also very much on-brand.

If he'd made a platform to rival twitter, that would have been another platform.

It does seem interesting that people like Trump, despite their celebrity, have significantly greater reach nowadays via platforms, not via blogs like in the days of the early internet.

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