With Devin Nunes’ help, Can Donald Trump steal Twitter’s most engaged users/members? Elon may have made a mistake turning Trump back on. Time will tell.
I have no idea whether Trump has a plan to take advantage of his Twitter handle reinstatement, or not. As someone who is paid to strategize about how best to leverage digital media platforms, this is what I’d do in his position. (this one just popped into my brain, so had to share)
- Re-join Twitter with great fanfare once his followers are fully loaded (Should be done by end of day 11/20/2022) TODAY (as I write this his Twitter is at 83.1 million and his Truth is at 4.58 million)
- Use Twitter NOT the way he used to but only for posts that adhere to Elon (and his future “content moderation council”) policies; but rather link to the posts he makes on Truth Social where he has no content restrictions. By doing this, he can move nearly all his 80 million followers to Truth Social. That will result in a 10Xs Truth’s business value. The big advertisers may shun @truth based on their perception of poor “brand safety” but some of the MAGA base run businesses and love to sell to others within that “tribe.” MAGA is a community and a “movement,” like it or not.
- Get the Truth Social code refactored to make it more search engine friendly. (Google currently doesn’t properly index it. Come on!! Didn’t any of the coders take SEO 101?) Take the @ out of the https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump URL for a start and 301 the URL to the new home of https://truthsocial.com/realDonaldTrump, and change the site to make it search engine friendly.
- Change the Truth Social feed code to allow every member to prioritize the folks they are following on a scale of 1 to 10. Combine that with an engagement-driven AI to provide curated feeds to the members. That’s FAR superior to what Twitter does now. Elon may get there, if he can hire and retain engineers. Does this promote “echo chamber” content consumption? Yes, but that’s going to happen in every social network unavoidably.
From a policy perspective Twitter is NOT a “public town square” because in a town square not everyone gets a large megaphone. They all get the same soapbox and their own voice. Twitter, Truth Social, and the other platforms allow for an asymmetrical broadcast opportunity based on follower count. This creates perverse incentives to those with an interest in generating a following. Followings with high engagement over 10-million are HUGE megaphones. You might even say that Trump has a MAGAphone LOL.
Twitter, Truth Social, TikTok, Facebook/IG and the other platforms have significant power and as as Uncle Ben says in Spider Man, “”With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.” That responsibility now lies with a small number of folks, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Zhang Yiming and Trump with the help of Devin Nunes.
