Donald Trump is back on the Net, but this time he’s a blogger. The former president of the United States has put online a site that, according to the announcements made in recent months, was a candidate to be an alternative social network to those from which he was expelled after the violent invasion of the Capitol on January 6.
Meanwhile, for the moment it is just a simple blog, entitled “From the desk of Donald J. Trump”, included among the subsections of the pre-existing donaldjtrump.com, and presented as “a place where you can speak freely and in peace”. A blog created by Nucleos, a digital services agency founded by Brad Parscale, former manager of the Trump election campaign. A blog, above all, whose posts can be tagged with like (if you subscribe to the service) and relaunched with a click on Facebook and Twitter, but which at least for the moment it is not yet possible to comment.
Perhaps to avoid collecting all and immediately the repressed anger of the many Trumpian supporters, the same ones who in the past stood out for the vehemence of comments (to put it mildly) and who today could flood the new digital space with thousands of not too many comments. politically correct, bringing new legal headaches.
In January, the invasion of the Capitol cost the lives of 5 people and caused over 140 injuries. The reconstruction of the facts that took shape in the hours and days following the attack cast heavy shadows on Trump’s online communication, on his posts and tweets that denounced electoral fraud never demonstrated and proclaimed a victory that never took place. In a short time there were many who stigmatized that communication as one of the causes of the armed aggression in Washington, until to push social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and Snapchat to block the former president’s account, in some cases for life.
To date, only Facebook has bothered to review the case: right now, the Facebook Oversight Board, an independent, international and powerful group of essays created by the same social network to periodically check its policies, has returned to the Trump case. and has decided not to readmit it among its more than 2.6 billion people. The ban therefore becomes permanent and affects both Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, The Donald has done it by itself, and to be honest it hasn’t done much yet: the few posts on its Desk date back to March 24, a sign that there was a bit of experimentation before opening to the public. Reading them one by one, it must be said that the author has not lost his polemical verve, nor softened his approach towards his opponents, while he already seems on the right path to resume direct and disintermediate contact with the public and, of reflection, with the media. To understand this, just look at how many newspapers the recent post in which he defines the Republican Mitt Romney “a stone cold loser”, or “a total loser”, has already been taken up, after the latter had been booed during a public intervention.
It is difficult to say at this stage whether the operation will be successful: only on Twitter, at the time of his expulsion, Donald Trump had almost 88 million followers, a huge audience that followed and interacted with him also and above all because the complex and articulated mechanisms of the social network (well oiled by years of evolution) allowed and enhanced this interaction. Transferring that audience and that dialogue elsewhere, even if it is a proven tool and potentially still very effective as a blog, is neither easy nor taken for granted.
The fact remains that the success of each platform on the Net depends both on the number of people who choose to use it (and Trump’s supporters are not few) and on the motivations that drive them, and which in this specific case do not seem to be lacking at all.
“From the desk of Donald J. Trump” could be a great success, a space from which fans of the former president could return to flood Twitter & co with the president’s posts, becoming his “evangelists” and bypassing the ban that relegates him to exile.
Another possible consequence could be that the operation revives blogs at the expense of social networks, prompting many to re-evaluate the independence and control of their information and digital identity that old weblogs have always ensured. If so, then we could say once again that not all evil comes to harm.