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kleinbl00  ·  702 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Twitter set to accept Musk's original $43 bln offer

That's very different from "truth." That's "clout" or "influence" or "charisma" or "credibility."

"Truth", even defined by those who don't particularly value it, has a measure of objectivity. It is a thing that is the same regardless of who says it or how it is said. "All Muslims are terrorists" is "true" for many conservatives, despite the statistical, objective falseness of the statement. However, "all Muslims are terrorists" is a statement evaluated the same regardless of whether it's a tweet, a soundbite or a t-shirt. The way to alter the "truth" of "all Muslims are terrorists" is for demonstrably non-terrorist Muslims to occupy a position of affinity among conservatives.

With Trump, "what he says" and "how he says it" does not matter in the slightest, it's the source that matters. Likewise, statements from Trump are not transitive from one conservative to another - neither Madison Cawthorn nor Matt Goetz, as we have learned, can "grab 'em by the pussy."

Finally, Trump's "truths" are also subject to the geopolitical environment in which he operates. Trump has been booed at his own rallies for claiming credit for COVID vaccinations, and has backpedaled furiously from his Putin associations. What was "true" two years ago is no longer "true."

If your definition of "truth" is "Trump says it" then "Trump's truth" is such a keenly variable concept that its relation to Twitter is so ephemerally variable as to render predictions worthless. I get your point - Trump is not bound to the truth in telling his "truths." But you haven't elucidated a reasonable argument as to how that has anything whatsoever to do with Twitter.

I'll go one better - Kamil Galeev had an interesting thread about Belarus and Lukashenko a couple days ago.

Galeev makes the point that Lukashenko has always been the stronger player between Lukashenko and Putin, and that Lukashenko has inoculated himself against intrigue by playing the idiot bumpkin (much as Boris Johnson does). He goes further by pointing out that Lukashenko routinely sabotages Putin by taking the official Kremlin party line to an absurd extreme, thereby depriving it of credibility.

On that note? Total control by an edgelord billionaire could very well be the thing that breaks the public of any sense that social media has any credibility or impartiality, rather than its (unearned) position of esteem among people who should really know better. Jeff Katzenberg made certain that Trump couldn't fart without it being on CNN; the end result has not been great for CNN.

Thus we come full circle: