In what possible universe would you think that any craziness in the US settled in 2020?

> Twitter can offer enormous power in setting a national narrative

I'm always skeptical about this. Twitter is dominated by journalists, celebrities, and tech people. Only about 23% of American adults have twitter accounts. Only 46% of those even open it daily. Of the active users 10% account for ~95% of tweets. Among those, ~70% identify as Democrats, and certainly aren't going to be swayed by Trump getting back on twitter.

It just isn't clear to me that twitter even matters in the realm of US politics. Voters just aren't really there, and when they are they predominantly aren't engaging. When they do, they're mostly democrats tweeting at one-another.

Less than 2% of the American public has a subscription to the New York Times. Would you say the nytimes doesn't matter in the realm of US politics?

Well, since you asked I think they probably have less influence than they would like to think.

Now they are syndicated in a number of other papers, discussed broadly on social media, cable news, local tv news, and across a number of new podcasts. Their reach is probably a good bit greater than the ~5 million subscribers. I would also note that 100% of subscribers are getting news from the NYT, because well obviously, so that's something. They do seem to have some sway on Democratic primaries sometimes, and do seem to shape opinions among a certain class of people. What does that all add up to? I don't know. Do they matter in the realm of US politics, probably, but I'm no sure how to quantify it.

I tend to agree with you, I guess I’m in the minority. I think a lot more political manipulation happens on Facebook.

I'm not sure I buy the manipulation line either. People seek out information that fits their overall world view. It's hard to grapple with anything that challenges your beliefs. Insofar as people engage with bullshit on Facebook its probably because they already believe a particular thing, or it fits their existing beliefs. I highly doubt that facebook posts are changing a lot of minds. I'm also skeptical that it spurs very many people to actions they wouldn't otherwise take.

A lot of the news articles talking about the effects of facebook focus on how many people "saw" a particular post. Given how those impressions are gathered, I'm no convinced that a significant percentage of those impressions resulted in people actually reading the post or even the headline, let alone that resulting in any real world outcomes.

I think the people that build social media applications want everyone to think that they have the power to shape discourse and outcomes, and newspapers who's ad revenue is undermined by social media also want us to believe social media is dangerous. Those two things do not make it true.

There are ~260 million adults in the US. That gives 60,000,000 Twitter users and 28,000,000 daily users. (I don't think "active users" is useful---it's about readers, not writers. Further, many of the important writers are not from the US.)

In 2020, Biden received 81,000,000 versus Trump's 74,000,000; the difference is 7,000,000.

Facebook may well be more powerful, but Twitter is still matters.

> but Twitter is still matters

I REALLY doubt it. Of the 28,000,000 daily users, mind you that means they open it once a day, 70% get news from the app. Of those only 37% say it increases their political engagement. This is roughly 7 million people who report any change in political engagement in the US as a result of looking at twitter. These people are overwhelmingly democrats living in big cities. I'm just not convinced that such a narrow, concentrated slice (2.7% of adults) of the the US population is really that big of a deal.

Now you could make a case that twitter maybe matters more in other places outside of the US, but that's not really related to the trump/no trump issue that I was replying to originally.

Because Jan 6 was completely normal.

Well, when you take a look at the other riots happening around that time, Jan 6th was 'mostly peaceful'

Whataboutism is a logical fallacy and doesn’t address the argument at hand

Adding context is not a logical fallacy.

The context is that the 2020 Mostly Peaceful Protests, a worldwide pandemic, and extreme political polarization weren't normal, either.

Isn't this whole thread whataboutism? The claim is the world will go back being as crazy as it was in 2020 (but OP gave a 2021 example) if Trump was let back on Twitter.

The counterargument was that the example given was actually in 2021, and the given example of crazy (Jan 6 2021) was less crazy than 2020 (BLM protests).

Just as an aside, whataboutism is not a logical fallacy.