To add to that, Twitter shares dropped significantly on opening and ended the day down -2.75%. By contrast, the S&P rose 1.5% today. In the absence of other confounding variables, this would suggest investors see a material effect of his words.

That's silly, compare TWTR to other small cap tech and its pretty much in-line for the day (eg, PINS, CHWY, SHOP). It's also fairly in line for QQQ. There's no evidence that trump's tweet changed anything about Twitter's price movement today.

I dropped Twitter stock not because I think they will be regulated (they may) but because I think this was just a stupid move, and shows they aren’t making good business decisions.

> shows they aren’t making good business decisions.

I mean, I could have told you that when the already part-time CEO announced he'd move to Africa for a year :)

Africa is going to be the next {China, India, Vietnam, ...} in terms of manufacturing, industrial growth, smart phone and payments penetration, etc.

Dorsey is being incredibly smart by trying to figure out how to break into the African market. He probably wants to do payments there. Get in early, win the market. It's genius.

Just look at what's happening with Belt and Road.

Africa is going to be huge.

If I had his money and influence, I would be doing the same.

wait for tomorrow - he's already moving in this direction. THese are very concerning times...

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that he's telling Twitter to "cut their crap". I would bet about half the country sees it that way, and agrees with him too.

I don’t see a chilling effect. If anything it’s a heating and dividing effect, but certainly this isn’t making people quieter about the debate.. see this comment thread for proof.

It's not chilling random Internet commentators. It's chilling actions by large platforms to have or keep any principles.

This has nothing to do with people and their debate. This is a direct threat to a company to violate their free speech which, in itself, is a crime not unlike directly threatening violence against a person.

It’s a threat to regulate them as a public utility certainly, but that’s been done before to phone companies (by the left) in the past.

It’s definitely a threat. But I don’t see any people backing down, and using “chilling” to me is just pathos to try and make one side seem right. It’s a disagreement on what to do and how to run our big platforms.

Trump didn’t just disagree with Twitter’s opinion of his tweets, or how Twitter operates.

He made threats to retaliate, clearly to chill speech he disagrees with.

They are not the same thing. Not even close. And businesses will have to take his behavior into account, especially if some people give him a pass for this.

Trump keeps moving the bar, or trying to, in terms of pushing back against any organizational or legal limits on himself.

It has been both amazing and depressing to see how quickly people start making excuses for him, and declaring his behavior acceptable when it is clearly corruption.