That means losing access to the mainstream platforms will reduce his audience and dilute the reach of his statements, as the deplatforming of far-right figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos shows. Yiannopoulos, who was banned in 2016 for his repeated racist abuse of actress Leslie Jones, complained about the effect that deplatforming had on his income.
“Part of it is because people just don’t remember to go to other websites,” says Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Donovan, a regular MIT Technology Review contributor, points out that the mainstream platforms have built in “bells and whistles” designed to minimize friction and make engaging with content as easy as possible. If Trump was limited to a niche service with limited design and features, such as Parler, she says, it would create an additional barrier to share his content.
Communicating through proxies–with smaller followings
Even during @realdonaldtrump’s day-long absence from Twitter, he was not entirely silent on the platform. On Thursday, while the president was still unable to post from his personal account, White House social media director Dan Scavino tweeted a statement from the president that conceded the election–but did not concede his claim that the election was stolen. It was picked up by the media, but with 40,000 retweets and 100,000 likes, it fell far short of the hundreds of thousands that typically engage with each of Trump’s own missives.
As a result, it is “casual supporters” that Trump is most likely to lose if he is permanently banned, says Brooking; they “will hear from him less frequently,” which could mean that that “in time, they may become less wedded to the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that he has made a habit of spreading.”
Of course, it depends on whom he’s speaking through. Much of his disinformation around voter fraud, for example, came from a wider “network of content creation,” says Donovan; that is, individuals close to the president who each have large followings themselves, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood, among others. “These are the accounts that I’m most worried about, because these are the people that are incentivized … because they’re making money off of this,” she says.
A Trump “digital media empire” could also be blocked
One route around losing his perch on major social media sites could be for Trump to spin up his own systems to talk directly to supporters. The campaign app for his failed campaign for reelection, for example, had its own news and notification system which often shared questionable or disproven stories that emphasized the president’s talking points.
