They Didn't Move to Canda, but They Might Leave Twitter
Thinking About Symbolism and Protest in the Market
Photo by Mandyme27 at Pixabay.
One of my favorite forms of political cheap talk is: “If Republicans win, I’ll move to Canada.” And of course, every time a Republican wins the White House, we don’t see a mass exodus from San Francisco to Manitoba. On one level, the statement is rather silly. Few people are willing to uproot their lives entire lives because one election doesn’t go their way. But the “I’ll move to Canda” motto raises a classic question about politics and markets - when do people actually exit in protest?
Twitter is a great example. We’ve seen, at least, two Twitter exit movements. Many conservatives came to believe that they were unduly censored and that ultimately resulted in a movement in 2021 to move to new social media platforms such as Parler and Truth Social. Recently, some liberals have moved from Twitter to Mastodon. Mastodon may not have socialized health care, but at least it doesn’t have Elon Musk.
This raises a few questions. First, how cheap does moving have to be before people actually do it? I think the answer is they won’t move even if the moving cost is nearly zero. Consider Twitter. The company claims about 360 million followers, but the Twitter mastodon account (as of Dec 26, 2022) only claims 180 thousand followers. News reports claim about 2 million Mastodon users. Still, only .5% of Twitter’s size. The lesson is clear. Migration is too much of a pain for most folks if all you need to do is download an app and set up an account.
A second question has to do with theatrics. Some people vocally proclaimed that Twitter under Musk was too corrupt and horrible and then shut down their accounts. Why? These weren’t people banned by Twitter and they seem to enjoy using Twitter. One answer is simply identity politics. They really liked the liberal technocrats that used to own Twitter and they hate Elon. Another answer is purity. Perhaps this small group of vocal quitters are really incredibly upset that they exist in a social space with almost 400 million users where a few non-progressives are highly visible and have status.
I will follow Mastodon and Truth Social so see what will happen. Compared to large all-purpose platforms like Facebook or Twitter, they will be niche, but they could succeed. But rather than being true alternatives to mainstream social media, they will likely evolve into satellites of the Democratic and Republican parties.
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