Is Twitter On the Ropes?

At the Epoch Times, Roger Simon notes a recent drop in Twitter’s share price and urges readers to disconnect from the left-leaning platform:

Twitter’s stock fell 15 percent last week apparently because they’re not getting sufficient numbers of new users to please the market. People are not as intrigued as they used to be with an allegedly open social media platform that’s not really open, in fact is something of a dictatorship.

I know you’re not supposed to kick someone when they’re down. But when that someone has been acting in the most unAmerican, peremptory ways for years, as if the Bill of Rights never existed, censoring people without explanation—even a former president—blocking free discussion of medical science, for Heaven’s sake, and treating conservatives and libertarians pretty much the way Ferdinand and Isabella treated the Jews before they finally kicked them out of Spain, it’s time to take action.

I had my own experience with Twitter. They sent me an email, addressing me with the username I had on Twitter for a number of years. They told me my account had been accessed by someone in New South Wales, Australia, who had changed my email address. Note, however, that they still had my old email address, where they sent their message, along with my username, to whom their email was addressed.

They said if I wasn’t the one who changed my email address, I should click here. I clicked here, and it asked me for my username–the same name Twitter had addressed its email to a half hour before. I typed in my username, and Twitter responded with a screen that said they had never heard of any such user. They have continued to take that position in response to numerous emails from me and others. At first I thought it was incompetence, but now I think that someone at Twitter chose to get rid of me.

So if Twitter goes broke, it is fine with me. As Roger noted, new users are down, but stock market ups and downs are notoriously transient. This chart shows Twitter’s share price over the last year:

The value of Twitter stock has indeed declined by 24% since its most recent high of $71.71 per share. Whether this is a significant long-term trend depends, in large part, on how conservatives act going forward. Roger encourages us to give up on Twitter and other leftist platforms:

Maybe dominoes will begin to fall. After all, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, et al, can be defeated and rendered irrelevant with the non-click of a mouse. All you have to do is not do it.

So now is the time—there may never be a better—for all good men and women to leave Twitter—no excuses.

There is much more at the link, but I will skip to this:

So all the more reason “Twitter delenda est,” to borrow a phrase from Cato.

And assuming it is destroyed, there are plenty of candidates out there ready to replace it (Parler, Gab, Tell, Frank, Mind, and so forth) with many undoubtedly waiting in the wings.

They all share something that Twitter doesn’t have—free expression and lack of censorship.

I didn’t rejoin Twitter, and set up a Parler account instead. You can read my Parleys there, if you like. Will these upstart platforms compete successfully with Twitter? I don’t know, but I am not optimistic. I suspect that the major social media platforms are natural monopolies because of network effects. Their value comes largely from the fact that everyone is on them. If that is right, you could break up Facebook, for example, into five rival platforms (much like there used to be a competition between Facebook and MySpace), and in a couple of years there would be one left standing.

If the social media platforms are in fact natural monopolies, then, as Roger writes:

Turning Google, Facebook and Twitter into public utilities is not exactly what their owners or the Democratic Party—once, as I recall in the distant past, adherents of free speech—have in mind. In fact,…it will be fought as nothing before by this phony-liberal Congress and will take courage no Democrat has shown in years to pass.

To be blunt, Congress won’t pass any such legislation. Actions against leftist social media can only be taken effectively at the state level. Encouraging steps in that direction have been taken; meanwhile, I echo Roger’s advice that you Just Say No to Twitter.

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