Did something happen at Twitter yesterday?
To listen to the left side of Twitter it’s been a lot of handwringing and manic school-girl screams for a month straight. Left wing celebrities like Billy Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg etc have threatened to leave the platform all together.
Barbara Streisand, Rob Reiner, and Robert Reich have all bemoaned the inherent danger posed by the platform not squelching opinions that don’t match their own.
Yes Elon Musk has managed to cause Left-Twitter a moment of reflection. He has give them the gift of awareness of their circumstances and the helpful reminder that things can change quickly.
This weekend he pulled the switch to Mach 10 on reality when he posted an open ended poll asking current Twitter users to vote on whether he should reactivate President Trump’s account.
Amazingly the progressive rhetorical terrorists who believe they and only they should be allowed to decide what is seen on the platform came face to face with reality.
Originally posting his survey at 7:47p ET Friday night, Musk posts the open source survey. It garners more than a million votes per hour and by 8p ET Saturday evening the Marxists Anti-Free Speechers had been humiliated:
Let Trump On: 7,844,438
Keep Trump Off: 7,241,019
By more than 600,000 votes the vapid left-only Twitter crowd was routed.
Musk also did something else.
When other prominent accounts were restored this week it appears that their old follower totals were restored with them. Yet shortly after President Trump’s page was restored people were alerted that they would need to go refollow. When I checked it at 9p he was at roughly 1.4 million followers. Roughly ten hours later (as I pen this) he has re-gained 72.4 million.
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By producing the poll which generated 1 million page visits per hour and more than 134 million page visits total, and by activating Trump’s page and thus generating 7 million page views per hour minimum—Musk is on target to deliver close to a third of 1 billion page views to his platform in one weekend, from those two actions alone.
To his credit President Trump has said we will not re-engage on Twitter, though evidently there are hundreds of millions of people who are ready to welcome him back if he does.
And let’s face it, that’s what this was always about to begin with. Donald Trump (at the time — and I predict soon will be again) was the most followed Twitter handle in history. When he was squelched and then silenced the platform immediately hit turbulence. When the great purge was executed (full disclosure my account was deplatformed) they lost all the traffic that went with those as well.
Revenue began slowing, board members were having to answer questions from angry share holders, and the man who built it—resigned. The board dumped 99.99% of the shares they owned and at the time when Facebook was trading above $200 a share Twitter eventually dropped into the $20’s before rebounding slightly to its delisting price of $57 per share.
In the name of being woke, Twitter violated its obligations to its shareholders, and purposefully sabotaged its own potential. It did so because it allowed editorial opinion to drive its operations. It removed the most favored inventory from its shelves and said the discontinuation was permanent. When Twitter throttled Trump, the marketplace suffocated Twitter.
This self destructive business practice was what I predicted in the Twitter post that got me banned:
Twitter claimed I was advocating violence. I was actually predicting the self-injected turbulence they were reigning down on themselves.
Musk is a smart businessman. This weekend he brilliantly added value to his latest corporate venture.
I also believe he means it when he defends free speech. He also restored the accounts of the heinous Kathy Griffin, and thinker Jordan Peterson. Candidly I’d love to see @KMCRadio restored too.
President Trump’s voice should never have been banned to begin with. The temper-tantrum throwing teenagers that were running Twitter at the time didn’t like having an opposing voice on their system and they behaved as childishly as possible to stop it.
President Trump was smart enough to seize upon the mistake. Trump Social has become an amazing platform (that has regularly outpaced Twitter in new user installations since it’s release.) Gettr, Rumble, Parler, GAB, and others also benefitted.
The late Rush Limbaugh always reminded us that the solution to those that would try to stop free speech, is more speech. President Trump doesn’t have to engage in Twitter, but it would make the conversation there so vibrant. And with Musk’s proposed technological improvements and algorithms it’s likely that it would again make Twitter a must in the day to day dialogue.
No President Trump doesn’t have to return.
But I hope he does!
And so does Elon.
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