Monday, March 22, 2021

The Anti-Social Network



Former President Donald Trump is coming back to social media -- but this time with his own network, a Trump spokesperson told Fox News on Sunday.

Jason Miller, a long-time adviser and spokesperson for Trump's 2020 campaign told Howard Kurtz on Fox's "MediaBuzz" that Trump will be "returning to social media in probably about two or three months." He added Trump's return will be with "his own platform" that will attract "tens of millions" of new users and "completely redefine the game."

"This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media," Miller told Kurtz. "It's going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what President Trump does, but it will be his own platform."

Miller said during his appearance on Fox News that the former president has been approached by numerous companies and is in talks with teams about the new platform.

"This new platform is going to be big," Miller said on Sunday. "Everyone wants him and he's going to bring millions and millions -- tens of millions -- to this platform."

The announcement comes after Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and other social platforms, such as Facebook, following his incitement of the US Capitol riots on January 6 -- where hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building, leaving five people dead.
 
 
 

 

This is going to be a terrible idea, because we're mostly going to see the demand by the insurrectionist Trumpist right to take Trump's hate platform seriously as "news" and it will be relentlessly covered by our broken press.

Even worse, there's a very good chance that the GOP will use Trump's platform as a stalking horse to go after Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, with "very concerned" Beltway types arguing that the only way to rein in Trump's hate speech is to "reform" all of social media by removing federal liability protections, leaving Red State attorneys general to go after everyone but Trump's platform while decrying any efforts to stop Trump's hate speech as political targeting from Biden's "corrupt" Justice Department.

It doesn't take much to see this becoming the fast track back to the daily political relevance of Trump, and a daily way to constantly feed his violent cultists their steady diet of outrage and anger.

I know I've said for year that Trump wants his own TV network, but with FOX News and its competitors fighting over him, he doesn't need it. His own social media network would potentially be much more powerful for much less money, and it would control the political discourse of basically all cable news for free.

If Trump can get major political investors behind this project so that their servers can't be cut off by hosting services like Amazon or Google, this could be a nightmare cesspool of white supremacist hate with no bottom. That's the worst-case scenario, certainly.

Or, it could crash and burn like Trump's other projects because he lacks the expertise and the will to pay the people who actually can run something like this the money they'll want. Maybe it'll never get off the ground in the first place, and given Trump's history, the likelihood of failure to launch is relatively solid.

We'll see.

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