After less than a month, Donald Trump closed his blog. He was the only user, he had written a newspaper. In reality apparently it had a thousand visitors a day. Very few, for a man used to making a splash on social media, shooting tweets in bursts that ignited discussions made of exclamation marks and capital letters.
Since yesterday, those who visit the site launched on May 4th only find a form to register for receive news from the former president when they will be there. Is this good news for democracy? It is a striking proof of the power that social media have in making us exist, in giving us a digital identity, in allowing us to build social networks and to make ourselves heard. Without it, we don’t exist. There are no political leaders without social profiles: some, by choice, do not have Twitter, others do not have Facebook, still others have chosen to favor Instagram, very few venture to TikTok and Twitch. But somewhere they are. They cannot do without it, even when they are not there personally but as an institution (this is the case of Mario Draghi e Sergio Mattarella).
As Casey Newton wrote, the closure of Trump’s blog sheds light the importance of social platforms for Trump: the strength that the former president acquired did not derive from the fact that he could speak, especially tweet, but from the amplification that the algorithm and the network of followers made of his messages, making them global. The ten posts made in a month on his blog were largely ignored. As if they came from a distant universe. However, this means that social networks have a key role in the democratic game: they can silence a politician and effectively eliminate him, not only from the platform, but from the global arena where the debate is articulated and the political agenda is built, in some cases even consensus. That power is enormous.
Let him in the hands of a small group of Silicon Valley companies without transparency or accountability rules is a democratic issue that goes beyond Trump.
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