Comment by millstone
5 years ago
IMO this is a misunderstanding of the situation.
People on Twitter are mostly not voting for Trump. Trump voter demographics are roughly white male rural middle-income evangelical non-college-educated over-50, and this does not overlap much with Twitter user demographics (80% millennials).
So Trump has nothing to lose on Twitter, so he can't lose. The goal for his tweets is to make a big story, and Twitter intervening makes it an even bigger one.
While the demographics non-overlap is true, it's not an insignificant number listening to him either. But he gets something else from Twitter: famous (verified) people involvement which amplifies what he's saying, and the profile being public to the world in a trivially news-embeddable form. I believe it matters and if he got a separate blog-like site where he can post, the reach and reuse of his posts would not be even close to what it is now. (and he'd possibly be less motivated without seeing the number of likes)