Re-Platforming Myself
How the end of Trump’s blog made me rethink my approach to writing full-time
A month or so ago, Donald Trump launched a blog. Then, 29 days later, he shut it down. What happened?
The answer is, well, not a whole lot. From the Washington Post:
“On its last day, [Trump’s blog] received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions.”
When Twitter decided to ban Trump, critics of the decision argued that it violated his freedom of speech. And yet, that Trump was able to start a blog illustrates that it wasn’t really his freedom of speech that Twitter was restricting, but his freedom of reach. If freedom of speech were the problem, where Trump was publishing would be irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter if his rants are on Twitter, or Facebook, or a blog. Clearly, though, it does.
In a recent issue of Platformer, Casey Newton cites the technologist Aza Raskin, who was the first to distinguish between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Freedom of speech is the right to say what you want, but, as Renee Diresta put it in a 2018 essay for Wired:
“There is no right to algorithmic amplification.”
