One tactic I think is likely to come from Barr and the DOJ is a corrupt selective enforcement of anti-trust laws - decide Twitter and AWS are monopolies but Facebook and Microsoft are not.
Normally such threads come from people which are somewhat in the process or trying to de-mantel a democracy. So a US president saying something like that is quite worrying even if his intentions are not to undermine the US democracy.
EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying your post is ridiculous, but Trump is. And yes the following is somewhat sarcasm END EDIT.
Let me guess next Mercedes and BMW have a oligopol on cars and china will be classified as a company with an monopol on cheap products.
The crazy/scary think is that I believe Trump would totally cable of doing it if he get's the legal power and time to do so...
> Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back
I'm not convinced of that. Trump has repeatedly shown he is willing to exercise executive authority to the fullest extent possible and the courts have repeatedly affirmed his ability to do so. I'm not sure what kind of "bite back" you expect, but that kind of thing has never been an obstacle for Trump. At the end of the day I think you're right that he's bullying them, but I think it's wrong to believe that he won't actually go after them if they do not comply with his demands or at the very least retract the fact-check and praise him
they wouldn't, and even if they did it would be a helpful change. society's legitimization of twitter (a brand whose logo is on so many unrelated products, billboards, flyers, advertisements etc) is what makes his disinformation on that platform dangerous.
if he's siloed to somewhere that is obviously just for his supporters, it will have far less of a dangerous effect. people made the same threat about alex jones, and deplatforming him was absolutely a positive for society.
I mean the influencers would never voluntarily cede a legion of followers but they'd absolutely and vocally support Trump if he moved to a different platform and all his fans would create accounts on that new platform if they didn't have one already.
> society's legitimization of twitter...
We're in complete agreement there, it's a tough cultural problem, not sure how we solve it without just teaching the next generation to be highly skeptical of social media platforms.
> he's siloed to somewhere that is obviously just for his supporters, it will have far less of a dangerous effect
I don't think it makes much difference, it costs nothing to just "exist" on twitter even if you engage primarily on a different platform, twitter would just become one of many targeted dumping grounds for all the crap they cook up in the silo. Honestly I'm surprised it hasn't happened already, but I think it's their next logical step, something like a mainstream 4chan.
He uses twitter because the influencers are on twitter. There's a reason he posts there instead of on his campaign website.
If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.
He has 80m followers on twitter alone, that's ~20% of all twitter users, even if half of that followed him to a new platform it would be instantly legitimized, it doesn't have to be bigger than twitter to be a success. That's without considering all the ancillary support from Trump media allies who would direct all their fans to engage on Trump's new platform for the sake of freedom and free speech in America.
> If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.
I believe it's the next logical step. Twitter doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, the media will report on whatever Trump says no matter where he posts it and his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.
Social media companies always act like they are completely guiltless in the rise of the harmful far-right, but these far-right people exploit their inventions to obtain cultural relevancy. The right truly struggles to create culture on their own
Many of his followers are bots, and almost 75% haven't logged in more than 120 days. I'd be very surprised if more than 10% of his followers were real and active.
>I believe it's the next logical step.
If it was that easy he would've done it already if just for the ego boost. Twitter is getting him something that he doesn't think he can get on his own.
>his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.
Again, my family is full of trump supporters and none of them read his tweets directly.