Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

February 11, 2021

Did Twitter Suffer for Banning Trump?

Not based on available data on traffic and tweeting.

We’ve written at length about Donald Trump’s use of Twitter, both the good and the bad. We won’t rehash that here. What we are interested in is how Twitter has fared after its widely publicized banning of Trump while he was still president.

Surely, denying the president of the United States use of the public square for his own free speech would bring severe consequences for a company like Twitter, especially if the 74 million Americans who supported Trump in November or the 90 million who followed him on the platform took their ball and went home.

Nope.

“Trump’s ban doesn’t even register as a blip on Twitter’s growth this year, which has continued unabated after his ban,” wrote Kalev Leetaru of RealClear Media recently. In fact, Twitter’s traffic did so well that Leetaru believes the social media giant “may feel more emboldened to silence other prominent voices, safe in the knowledge that doing so won’t impact its growth.”

The traffic stats are interesting. Leetaru notes that while Twitter doesn’t divulge its full statistics, “it is possible to estimate its growth from the daily random sample that it makes available of 1% of all tweets, which is highly correlated with its actual growth.” He writes, “Since its peak in July 2013, Twitter was on a years-long decline through the end of 2018, but had begun slowly growing again over the course of 2019. Then, in the space of just two weeks in the middle of March 2020, as lockdowns swept the world, the platform grew by almost 100 million tweets a day, rising back to its July 2013 numbers.”

That growth continued through 2020 with one exception. The biggest blip in the last year seems to have been Twitter’s late-October push to censor election news that would hurt Joe Biden. But Twitter recovered from that traffic drop, and Jack Dorsey’s outfit helped in accomplishing the Left’s mission: defeating Trump.

Thus, we’re left to conclude once again that unless the market of users chooses to punish Twitter for its censorship, Big Tech will roll on.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.