And the “ambivalence” of it all.

This post is a “guest Twitter thread” by StrickSimon, listing some of his reasons for being “ambivalent about some joyful reactions to #TrumpBanned”. I am posting it here with author’s permission and some extra comment, because I share most of that ambivalence and because Threaderapp is NOT the way to make and keep Twitter content really available.

1. killing the account means nothing without accountability (e.g. in court asf).
2. we celebrate private companies for their political measures, while they have always profited from people like Trump and simply wait for the most opportune moment to kill their golden cow.
3. Trumps Twitter is not even one head of the fascist hydra, it is a pinky toe.
4. celebrating Twitter’s decision like a political victory only furthers the wholesale replacement of political processes with media practices.
5. the Account-ban is but a hygienic measure. All the propaganda is still there, it just turns invisible for some time, for some eyes.
6. people should be celebrating or at least talk about ACTUAL CHANGE. Whatever Twitter does - its not change for people.
7. Trump was always just the Cuckoo in the cuckoo clock. You can nail the little door shut, The mechanism - the clock itself - is intact and will continue to tell the time for many.

(I omitted one tweet because, unlike the others it’s purely personal, and I disagree with it, but it’s here)

Pop culture note, before returning to more serious arguments: I had never realized it until last Saturday, but “Trump out of a Cuckoo Clock” is not a new concept at all. Besides the great cartoon I found as thumbnail for this post, by RH Matson, there are others:

Following the money, and proposing solutions

One of the replies to the second tweet of the thread was: “how longlasting are celebrations of CEO decisions that obscure 10 years of profiting off of Trump?"

Me, I noticed, as countless others of course, that Twitter shares went down over 2% in after-HOURS trading after Trump suspension, and that Facebook did not react as swiftly as Twitter. The explanation may be in this Italian comment, on January 8th, of a Wall Street Journal article:

“Trump’s 89 million Twitter followers are nearly 48% of the total monetizable daily active user base of that social network at the end of Q3 2020. Facebook has a much larger base of 1.8 billion daily active users, and less than 2% of them, or 35 million, are Trump followers”.

In other words, Facebook could take more time to think, simply because it’s Too Big to Suffer immediately from what even Trump says.

All this “financial” side of the story really seems to me yet another example of the immensely stupid fragility of our way of living.

As for solutions…

This morning, I also published a solution that could prevent stuff like this from happening again, and is much simpler than everything else I have heard on the subject so far. It’s here, please read, share and comment it as much as you can.