Twitter is in a very winning situation. Before Trump took office and started tweeting a lot, the relevance of Twitter was often up for debate. Now they're a place where people get the latest updates from a world leader. That's great for Twitter.

> what about other equally bad but smaller accounts

Twitter bans many other equally bad ... and many other much less bad accounts.

> It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter.

Thought experiment: if instead of posting on Twitter, he sent an e-mail to a few thousand journalists?

I never use or consume Twitter, but I see screen captures of things Twitter posts all the time.

Granted: one big thing this approach misses is the back and forth. I gather Trump re-tweets quite a bit of stuff, and responds to others. I guess that could be simulated via e-mail.

My point is that as far as his ability to be heard, I don't think Twitter is necessary.

Can you cite exactly how Twitter isn't ensuring that bias + topical expertise are being disregarded in their fact checking routines...? They generally have in-house people + partner companies doing it.

Your entire post just reads like an advertisement for your project, which a number have tried and hit the limits of effectiveness on.

The page you linked doesn't contain explanation at all, what is a very important part of fact checking (if it can be automated, it can be tricked). It should probably contain a mix of automatic links with multiple independent human fact checkings that explain why a side should be picked over the other.

>But the current fact-checking approach is flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise.

This is a true statement.

>A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning

...seems to just introduce another level of bias. Every "media bias" website touts "objective analysis" while in the FAQ they admit to relying on a panel that they assure you is 100% objective. How do you guarantee that these ratings are not "flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise"? See: allsides.com[1] and Media Bias Fact Check [2].

Looking at your employee page, you seem to have exactly zero employees with any significant background in journalism. What "topical expertise" does Factual provide that a layperson doesn't have? How do you minimize human judgement?

This reads to me as "You shouldn't use Facebook because you're the product, not the customer, which leads to bad incentive alignment. Use Twitter instead."

[1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/

Trump would still be president between the election and inauguration.

Because it does not happen the same day.

Maybe...

I saw it posted somewhere that because 80m people follow Trump, he sways the monthly actives... but there are others with more followers than Trump.

I don't think there is enough evidence of his impact to the stock price.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

They might have more followers, but I'd be interested in seeing that in relation to how often those accounts tweet (tweets per year?).

Obama has a huge advantage over Trump and Modi. When you make a new account, Twitter normally suggests following Obama. That gets him followers for zero effort. On the other hand, new accounts that immediately follow a bunch of people like Trump get hit with random annoying account restrictions that might cause a person to hesitate or even delete their account.

Followers are largely irrelevant, here. Trump's tweets are cited on a weekly basis by hundreds of publications globally. More people view trump tweets not-on-Twitter than on the platform.

Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.

>This is obviously not true;

Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.

It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.