It absolutely played a huge part. But as far as "undeserved"... I'm not totally sure. He was the early lead in the GOP primaries. That alone means he "deserves" attention. What the media did that was undeserved is the continuous live feed for days on end. That was a first in history and it was fking weird TBH, like some mass addiction to newness. In this way, it's all American fault for their vulnerabilities to excitement and entertainment. They want the attention; the media gave the attention. Trump being a TV reality star knew how to play the media to his full advantage. American failed.
To be fair, it should also be noted that Trump wasn't even really popular in 2016. He lost the popular vote by millions to Hillary Clinton and she's almost universally disliked from both parties. That's even though Hillary Clinton was one of the chief contributors to CHIP, which is one of the few government healthcare services available in the state of Texas that aids children with healthcare complications that are low income and provides healthcare to over 9.6 million children, 2 millions with chronic illnesses, nationwide. For instance, you'd have needed the entire population (not even including voting population) of Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota to have 100% voted for Trump and he'd still have been just under 300,000 votes shy of beating Hillary Clinton in the popular vote nationwide in 2016. I always interpret the criticism of the coverage of Trump in 2016 as a complaint of the shortcomings of capitalism as that's what the real complaint is about. You're asking media companies to not cover a topic that will generate them more money than if they don't cover it. But ethically, those companies must engage in practices that will earn the most amount of money because those companies have investors and they owe it to those investors to produce the biggest profits possible within the legal and illegal constraints they can get away with. So if covering Trump 24/7 got them more revenue than if they didn't, they had to cover Trump as much as they did. They're just playing the game within the system we allow them to operate in. So the real criticism is the system that encourages the type of behavior you find unpleasant from media companies whose bottom line is their profit margin and less so how their coverage could negatively impact the greater overall population.
Basically, instead of being an equal platform for democracy, it's "pay to get your voice heard more".
The world is interdependent. There are the final actions (the voting for Trump). That vote is influenced by everyone and not just Trump and the voters.
It seems Elon might be losing advertisers who don't want their ads shown next to hate speech and such. He doesn't seem to realize that part of "free speech" is "don't want to advertise on your platform".
This. I have no idea how twitter makes money every time I click on something interesting I don't see any adds and I have never had a reason to go any deeper than that. What do you need to do differently that you would have adds popping up? I still don't understand Twitter anyway, but if having a blue check means that much to drive revenue that tells a lot about the people who use it constantly. Also how is add revenue still a big thing when most people just ignore them.
Boy, you just love blaming the left for any and everything. And the left before Trump actually got the nomination was not obsessed and even if so it was not their obsession that got him the nomination, which makes your point moot. The left is also not obsessed with Musk, but you sure are obsessed with blaming anybody on the left that does not agree with you.
There are lot of things that influence someone to vote but individuals ultimately have agency to make that choice. It's a frequent trope from many on the Right who claim to not like Trump that it's the Left that keeps on talking about him. Yes those on the Left do talk about him a lot because he's still very relevant. He's relevant because there are Republican candidates who suck up to him and literally running on platforms that he should still be President. It seems to me that Trump's relevance isn't on the Left or the media but on those who are still supporting him.
I don't know enough to know if possible subscription revenue> foregone ad revenue, but more importantly it's way too boring a thing to care about if I'm not getting paid to. I'm skeptical there's enough to justify the ridiculous debt load they took on for Twitter which is why every few weeks day there's a brand new product/strategy idea ("Twitter on the Blockchain" "X the everything app" ) that bears little relation to the one before it. But now the debt is due its just standard product strategory blah, what the hell do i know, maybe it will work. or not. Whatever. I do get why we're talking about it though - since most journos are Twitter addicts they're going to keep writing stories about run of the mill ux changes on it and everything else (mostly for other Twitter addicts).
Much like democracy, it's those with money who gets heard. Pay $8 to get promoted past those who pay hundreds of dollars for bot followers. A big selling point of Twitter is all the scraping tools (let's call it analytic tools) that can be built, including ripping accounts and disrupting or influencing discussions.
