Twitter tames Trump, but what about mighty Musk?

Behave yourself, my Mama used to say, or you lose your toys.

Are you listening, Mr. Trump?

The nation’s former president probably heard that message from his mother many moons ago, even if his more recent behavior tells us it didn’t quite sink in.

Whether or not his mother gave him that message, last Friday a federal judge in San Francisco certainly did. The toy in this case is Trump’s Twitter account which was suspended two days after a mob spurred by his “stop the steal” lies stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 last year in hopes of overturning the presidential election.

Although investigations by the Justice Department and a congressional committee looking into the insurrection continue, Twitter didn’t have to wait that long. The San Francisco-based tech giant said Trump violated its rules against glorifying violence with a pair of tweets, including one praising his supporters as “patriots.”

Losing his biggest megaphone for gripes and insults cost him an audience he had built to more than 88 million followers, including me. Life seems less stressful to me now.

Of course, Trump didn’t take it lying down. He sued Twitter for taking his toy away, charging that his free speech rights were infringed.

That’s hard to prove since, as I have told numerous people who cite the First Amendment without actually reading it, the Constitution only prevents government from infringing on your rights to free speech and press, among others. It does not apply to private companies such as Twitter.

But, Trump came up with a novel argument. He claimed that Twitter was effectively functioning like the government. That’s rich but wrong. Even though some tech giants seem to function like the government with the influence they have on politics, nobody elected them but their stockholders.

Nevertheless, the

Trump side argued, Twitter had been pandering to liberal Democrats in trying to silence contrary viewpoints by barring him from its platform.

U.S. District Judge James Donato didn’t buy it. He said in part that Trump’s complaint “merely offers a grab bag of allegations to the effect that some Democratic members of Congress wanted Mr. Trump and ‘the views he espoused’ to be banned from Twitter because such ‘content and views’ were contrary to those legislators’ preferred points of view.”

Trump was creating another excuse to claim victimization, which is valuable currency today.

But a major break appears to be coming Trump’s way. Fellow billionaire and self-described free speech zealot Elon Musk said he would reverse Trump’s “permanent” ban after striking a deal last month to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

After starting his own apparently struggling Truth Social, Trump learned you can start a social media platform but that doesn’t guarantee many people will want to use it. The dirty little secret of Twitter’s popularity appears to be that people are attracted to it not so much to hear others who agree with them, but to find people from the other side and lob insults at them.

I think Musk and other social network moguls understand that, as

Trump apparently has found, it’s no fun to be a troll if you don’t have people on the other side to hear you troll them.

Maybe Trump should change Truth Social to Troll Social. I think he’d make another fortune, if he doesn’t lose his toys again.