Former US President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit seeking to force Twitter to reinstate him. He is arguing that the ban violates the First Amendment and his state’s new social media law. The latter goes nowhere, technically, since Twitter does not answer to Florida state. On the First Amendment one, I punt.
My main focus is this: Mr. Trump is learning that the most important feature in a social media platform is the USERS. Yes, you can clone Twitter, Facebook or practically anything but without the users, you have no product. So, despite all the efforts of many conservatives to build alternative platforms, none of these platforms has indeed appealed to the ex-president because none has the core feature: many users. Even the ex-president built one but later abandoned it!
This tells us one thing: if you are building digital platforms, there is one feature that matters: having many people in that ecosystem. Every other thing is marginal. I have called that the inversibility construct and it is very fundamental to success. Find the users and get them in because that is really what matters.
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Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction of Twitter’s ban, according to the complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida late Friday. The former president argues that Twitter, “coerced by members of the United States Congress,” is censoring him, describing the social media platform as “a major avenue of public discourse.” Trump seeks to be temporarily reinstated on Twitter while he continues his efforts toward permanent reinstatement.
Twitter “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate,” the complaint states. The former president used his @RealDonaldTrump account to announce policy and personnel decisions (often to the surprise of the agencies and people involved), criticize political enemies, and spread misinformation about election results.
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It’s not just having users but also a diverse one, because that’s what makes any engagement robust and entertaining, you cannot continually preach to the converted. In other words, Trump’s main concern here may not necessarily be about the size of user base, but the composition, because he wants his messages to also get to those who don’t like him, that’s why none of those homogeneous platforms his base could put up would serve.
As to how startups in the media space should go after large user base, well, the bandwagon effect preceeded emergence of social media platforms, network effects occasioned by unbounded nature of the web space just took it to whole new level.
People are likely to shop in supermarkets where so many people are entering, despite the delays it could cause, same goes for restaurants. A bank with fewer customers could serve you better, because you are not going to queue up once inside, but people are wary about such banks, because it could also mean that their closure is imminent…
Why do people seek admissions in school that are overpopulated? It’s the symptom, so it’s not really particular to social media or marketplace platforms; if you want to be heard by all people, you have to be where they are.
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