Twitter is back in the news and back in the crosshairs of conservatives as over the weekend they banned the personal account of Congresswoman (R) Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It caused quite a bit of backlash from the likes of Glenn Greenwald and others who called the action outrageous and a sign of a “dystopian” future.
Famous podcaster Joe Rogan, possibly pushed by the banning of Greene, made the switch to rival site Gettr and told his millions of fans that Twitter was likely to ban him as well very soon.
But Twitter may be digging their own grave here, something we’ve written about very recently.
Twitter, unlike other social media platforms, is very dependent on their “star power” from famous users.
Other platforms like Facebook or Instagram have a solid base of people who simply use it to communicate with real-life friends and family, as well as occasionally following celebrities.
But Twitter is much different, it’s really only used as a one-way street. People follow the big names, but very few people use it to keep in touch with real-life friends. It’s simply not built for that and other platforms do it better.
So this sets up a situation where Twitter losing a few key, big names can really harm their image and their user base.
If a big celebrity were to leave Facebook, many of that person’s followers would still use the service to keep in touch with friends. But when a big name leaves Twitter, many of their followers may have only used the service to follow that one person, and maybe a few others. Once those big users are gone, the followers either quit the service or move to another platform.
It’s impossible to accurately predict, but even a small exodus of big users could cause a significant collapse of Twitter’s user base.
Time will tell, but it looks like Twitter may end up inadvertently banning themselves and opening the door for other platforms taking the lead.
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