LG: Mm-hmm.
GIVE: But if Donald Trump does it, or Angela Merkel does it, or Benjamin Netanyahu, or Rodrigo Duterte, or whoever, with millions of followers and political support, the consequences in the real world could be much greater. So what I’m really curious to see is how Facebook responds to this policy suggestion?
LG: Right. Facebook therefore used this idea of notoriety to give these leaders additional leeway. It is probably a mistake to leave things as they are, when the council actually argues that it is these people who have such a big influence on real life actions and behaviors that they need to be addressed differently and maybe faster. Now, much of this conversation, of course, is centered on Facebook because we’re talking about the Facebook Oversight Board, but there’s nothing stopping Donald Trump from leaving the platform, going to another platform, and launch a website, or … I guess he can’t go on Twitter right now either. But tell us what it does now and what if you run again in the future, right? Where do you see its shared content?
GIVE: Well, he started his own website called From the Desk of Donald Trump, and that’s-
MC: Best website name ever.
LG: I must say I did not go to this website.
GIVE: Imagine Twitter, but the only user is Donald Trump, and there are no other features. This is what this site is. It’s a microblog. It’s a place where he can tweet his … well, let’s see what’s up now. I’ll go to donaldjtrump.com/desk.
LG: Is that really what the URL is?
MC: I am sorry.
GIVE: Not a joke. This is the real URL, and … “Kudos to the Great Patriots of Windham, New Hampshire, for their incredible fight to uncover the truth about the massive voter fraud that took place in New Hampshire.” I will not read the rest. If you are missing it in your life, this is where you can go to get it. And I find the existence of that, it’s obviously humorous. It’s also interesting because it simultaneously proves that Facebook literally can’t pick up Donald Trump. Facebook and Twitter kicked him off their platforms, but he’s still able to make his claims online.
But on the other hand, it’s not going to have the same juice as … Honestly, forget about Facebook. We all know that what really fueled Trump’s statements was Twitter. And the main reason is us, it’s the journalists. Journalists are intravenously connected to Twitter like very few normal people are. We are obsessed with what we see there. The platform has design elements that make it easy to comment on things, amplify them, and then laugh about it, or not laugh about it, and Trump used Twitter so well, and it was just a way to really inject. in the media discourse. And, of course, he was President of the United States and he was tweeting, “I’m firing the Secretary of State” on Twitter. And so, to a certain extent, the news media had no choice but to cover it, but it made it much easier to get our attention by going to where we were already, in a way that reporters aren’t checking Facebook for what Donald Trump has to say there, and certainly won’t check from donaldjtrump.com/desk.
The other thing, of course, is that he’s no longer president. As much as everyone loves talking about Donald Trump, seeing, say, this podcast, so much he’s not going to get the same level of media coverage when he’s not president, which brings us to your question, Lauren, et s is he showing up again? To what, I say first, can we all just breathe and enjoy a moment of relative, calm. I am not making a political statement, I am simply saying a preference for calm. This issue will be resolved by then. The Facebook decision will have been resolved by then. It will either be banned permanently, which I’m skeptical of, but we’ll see. I really don’t know, because this decision surprised me in the first place. Or he’ll be allowed to come back and maybe he’ll break the rules again and get fired again.
