Why do conservatives who disagree with social media censorship not just switch to blogs/RSS?

Question

Many conservatives believe that social media companies should not be able to block users based on politics. However, they keep using the social media platforms, and even those who have been blocked often try to get unblocked and return to the platform that they criticized for blocking them. Why don't they just switch to blogging, which is less likely to be censored? RSS allows for "news feeds" similar to those of social media, minus "the algorithm" that is criticized so much.

Answer 1

This doesn't look like a good faith question, but here is an answer:

Engagement & Discoverability.

Conservatives don't just write for themselves, they want to reach actual readers. Platforms such as twitter and Facebook have massive user-bases to discover their content. And discovery and engagement features such as retweets and algorithmically curated "feeds".

Conservatives do move to other platforms, including blogs.

Politically uncensored platforms such as gab and substack have experienced massive growth as have independent blogs (example).

Answer 2

Preaching to the Choir Echo Chamber.

First, a little disclaimer, a note on framing. I'm not sure that censorship is the right word when commercial media platforms decide what customer generated content is appropriate for their other customers. To demand neutrality from these companies interprets them as services for the public, like a phone company or an utility company. Infrastructure companies like that tend to run under a different legal framework when it comes neutrality, but also competition rules, and they tend to come under stricter government supervision. They may be organized in a commercial pattern, but they are not normal companies.

On the other hand, the thing about social media platforms is that they work best when almost everybody is on one platform. And how many platforms does one use regularly? One? Two? More? If the answer is "just a few," then there is your answer. What good is perfectly conservative, uncensored RSS or blog if all the swing voters are facebook and only those who share your opinion anyway go to the RSS or blog?

So the two sides of the analysis might suggest that facebook should be free of private censorship (kind of an oxymoron), but also that it needs to be under much stricter government supervision regarding their conduct. Or that society needs to find a better social media culture, where people learn to use different platforms to get a rounded view.

Answer 3

In some instances, they do, e.g. Substack, Rumble, Truth Social, and so on.

But, the real answer is discoverability. No politician, on any side of the political spectrum, writes for their echo chamber. The idea behind any politician writing any message is, "Look at what's happening, this is (good, and you should support it, because [reasons]) / (bad, and you should be angry about it, because [reasons]). I will do the thing, so (vote for me) / (support my bill) / (vote for my party) / (attend this protest) / etc!". If that's the type of content you are writing, do you want to reach hundreds of people of which 90% of whom will act on your message, or millions of people of whom perhaps 10% will act on your message? Clearly, even if you don't post to an "echo chamber" sort of environment, even if you post to a mostly-hostile environment, you're going to have more positive results with the latter than the former.

And that's basically the answer; even if only 30% of Twitter users are Conservatives or Conservative-minded independents (I have no idea of the actual number but I'm guessing it's sub-50%, far less than even that if you exclude international users who don't care about American issues), the raw numbers of users on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram as opposed to Substack/Rumble/etc means that promoting your message on those (according to them) hostile platforms is more profitable in terms of action than using yur preferred platform.

Answer 4

Over the last two or three decades — since Karl Rove and the beginnings of FOX News — the conservative movement at large has shifted to a rage/disaffection 'storm' model to motivate its base. The intent is to overwhelm opposition with emotional intensity and undercut reasoned dialog with petty and pugnacious personal attacks. This is a sea change from the previous conservative model (from WWII up through the HW Bush administration) which focused on 'Great Nation' ideals as its primary emotional motivation. They still leveraged fear and anger, mind you — think McCarthyism, Jim Crow, and the anti-gay rhetoric of the period — but it was fear and anger in service to the higher ideals of the American Experiment, not explicitly against it.

With that in mind, blogs, opinion pieces, missives, or other forms of complex written discourse simply won't do. Such writing (even in its coarsest form) is too cerebral: it can be used to inspire, it can be used to offend, but it is intrinsically mind-oriented and cannot produce the kind of guttural emotion that modern conservatives strategy relies on. For that, one needs social media of a certain type: media that provides broad, immediate, and rapid-fire dissemination of gut-reactions, inflammatory comments, crazed assertions, nasty insults, and any other unfiltered, uncensored emotional output. Blogs are good for disseminating content — thoughts, facts, ideas, concerns — but content is antithetical to this strategy. Modern conservative strategy relies on constant motion and agitation, an ever-flowing stream of poking and prodding meant to disrupt higher reasoning or discussion and keep a certain part of the political base in an ongoing emotional broil that can be targeted or retargeted at whim because it has no actual content. Why else do you think every time a conservative name-checks someone, that person receives a raft of death threats? That's not accident; that's strategy.

Conservatives want social media to be 'censorship-free' because conservative power rests on conservative voices being able to keep people in a thoughtlessly agitated mindset. It has nothing to do with free speech, except (in reference to the old LBJ story) the freedom to call someone a pig-f*cker.

Answer 5

Switching to blogs does not accomplish anything long-term.

If conservatives have a successful blog going on, nothing prevents their political opponents from going for it, targeting its name registrar, web hosting or DDoS protection service. A recent example of this seems to be KiwiFarms which was taken down from CloudFlare.

Once there is a culture of going against your opponent by extracting coercion from service providers, it might be even safer staying on social media. At least it's harder to pressure Meta over absolute nothing, whereas with Twitter & hosting companies it is displayed to be possible. It's also easier to replatform onto social networks by creating throwaway accounts, than to re-host your blog or similar platform.