Call it the Big Realignment.
Sorry, Gab, Parler, Gettr, and quite possibly even Twitter, someone has moved into your block. Your days are numbered. It was a noble try—well, in Twitter’s case, maybe not so noble—but you all knew this might happen.
The one person with the brand to remake the social media space—Donald J. Trump—has more than announced plans to do so. His beta is coming online next month. Signups have begun.
Evidently—after having been importuned to do such a thing for months, even years now, with people begging him to take on the cancel culture, and just when most of us had forgotten he might do such a thing—Trump has been working behind the scenes with, surprisingly and impressively, no leaks.
(We should have known, since he never signed on with the other companies, despite numerous invitations.)
I don’t know about the rest of you, but when the following popped up on my cellphone last night—“I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon.”—I not only took notice, I took serious notice (and signed up and then watched Don Jr. eloquently announce the program on Hannity).
The TMTG acronym apparently stands for the hitherto unheard of Trump Media & Technology Group, a so-called blank-check company designed to acquire other companies and underscored Big Tech reference above, suggesting, indeed promising, a larger ambition than just another online bulletin board.
This is going to be a big deal.
The 45th president clearly aimed to take on Big Tech—the Zuckerbergs of the world, not his friends and supporters such as Jason Miller of Gettr—on their own playing field and, much as many of us have mixed feelings about social media in general, it’s a fact of modern life and someone has to do something about its increasingly pernicious (to put it mildly) influence.
Who better than Donald Trump? In fact, who other than Donald Trump? (Well, maybe Elon Musk, but who would trust him in that arena?)
Another group that can move over are all those senators and congresspeople who have been working, or pretending to work, for years to reform Big Tech with, we can honestly say, less than zero results.
It’s easy to explain why that happened (money being the mother’s milk of you know what) and, thankfully, Trump has come along to compete with those monoliths in the market. With a basically inert government—on this subject anyway—it’s the only place they could be defeated or even have their power significantly diminished.
As they say, and as the Founders intended, the answer to bad speech is more, better speech.
Interestingly, this comes at almost the same moment as Zuckerberg is subsuming Facebook, seemingly for some kind of protection, under a construct called Metaverse, just as Google moved its search engine under the then-newly created Alphabet.
It’s almost as if we are preparing for a shootout, social media versus social media. But for the first time, those on the right of center will have a serious voice in the fight.
It should be epochal to watch—and maybe participate in.
Also, for the first time, the fight might actually be fair.
Friends Read Free