As Twitter Fades, So Does Threat of Trump’s Use of It

Anika Collier Navaroli is currently a Senior Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. A tweet by former President Donald Trump appears on screen during a House Select Committee hearing to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 9, 2022. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images) Former President Donald Trump is back to posting on X- the platform that used to be known as Twitter. As the person who made the argument inside Twitter for Trump to be deplatformed, the possibility that he would return to the platform used to haunt me. Now, I find the circumstances of his return in the current cultural and political context much different than I previously imagined.  Like most Americans, it wasn’t too long ago that much of my attention to political news was dictated by what Trump tweeted. Unlike most Americans, it was my job to analyze Trump’s tweets against Twitter’s rules and make recommendations to company executives about what to do with them.  Sometimes they listened, sometimes they didn’t.  The last time I was asked to review Trump’s tweets was on January 8, 2021. That day, he emerged from a temporary suspension following the violence at the US Capitol on January 6, which he instigated using Twitter. Once back on the platform, Trump notoriously continued his prior rhetoric, glorifying the political violence that occurred and announcing he would not attend the…As Twitter Fades, So Does Threat of Trump’s Use of It