Twitter has a dirty little secret, something CEO Jack Dorsey and his hundreds of millions of users — some of whom might even be real — don’t want you to know.
Nobody cares what happens on Twitter.
When I say “nobody,” I don’t mean people like you, gentle reader, who were probably too smart to ever get involved on the pond-scum platform. I don’t even mean people like myself, who fell in love with Twitter in its early days, but who finally quit when the oppressive Woke nonsense got to be too much.
When I say “nobody cares what happens on Twitter” I’m talking about the actual people — seriously, I’m assured some of them are probably real — who use Twitter.
To explain what I mean, you’ll need a little background.
Three weeks ago, my PJ Media friend and colleague Matt Margolis was suspended from Twitter for linking to his own VIP column stating that assistant secretary for Health and pretend four-star admiral Rachel Levine is male.
Matt refused to remove the “offending” tweet and the logjam between him and Twitter remains unchanged, three weeks later.
I couldn’t be more proud of Matt for standing his ground.
I also couldn’t be more proud of our managing editor, Paula Bolyard, for taking Matt’s side and provoking an even bigger fight with Dorsey and his digital flash-mob goons. “When Matt tweeted out his article,” Paula wrote a week after Matt’s lock-out, “his Twitter account was promptly locked. When PJ Media tweeted it out shortly thereafter, our official account was also locked.”
And so things still stand, two weeks later.
But to give you an idea of what our company-wide suspension has meant to us in real terms, I want you to imagine a particular scenario.
You’re enjoying a nice conversation in a dark bar when a big, tough-looking guy starts getting in your face, telling you to shut your mouth. You try to ignore him, but the taunting persists. Finally, you’ve had enough, and you tell the bully you’ll meet him outside.
But once you see him clearly for the first time, illuminated under a bright streetlamp, you can tell that the man who looked so big and tough under cover of darkness is actually quite old and much frailer than you’d thought.
That’s Twitter.
When Facebook decides to hurt PJ Media, they can really hurt PJ Media. People, for whatever reason, actually use Facebook to find news, read news, and share news. So when we annoy the Facebook Gods, it seriously hurts our bottom line.
But PJ Media has been at war with Twitter now for nearly a month, and guess what: Our traffic hasn’t been affected one whit.
People don’t go to Twitter to actually find, read, and share the news. They go there for (at best) small talk, and at worst, for shouting down their political opponents.
When you share a PJ Media link on Facebook (those times they allow it!), your connections click on that link and read our stuff. Thanks for that, by the way. But when you share a PJ Media link on Twitter… nothing happens. People — and Dorsey assures us that some of them might still be real — don’t read jack on Twitter. They scan the headlines, if that, and then get on with the serious business of spewing more malice-flavored ignorance.
Spending a few hours on Twitter doesn’t make anyone any better informed than spending a few minutes scanning Cosmo and National Enquirer headlines in the supermarket checkout aisle.
Twitter actually is Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Twitter is Seinfeld’s “show about nothing.” It turned out to be almost embarrassingly easy to take a stand against Twitter. Despite its millions of users and billions of dollars, Twitter doesn’t matter in any meaningful way.
So Twitter shut us down. So what?
Like the dead Russian he’s come to look just like, Jack Dorsey is our American Rasputin — a charlatan and a hanger-on whose work soothes the troubled minds of a corrupt (and ultimately doomed) ruling class.
One more thing…
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OK, that’s it, our first-ever VIP pledge drive is nearing its end. Thanks so much for sticking with us all week — I’m the first to admit that pledge drives can get a little wearisome. But if you’re one of our many, many brand-new VIP supporters, I hope today’s column has given you an even better idea of what an effective effort you’re supporting.
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