When Twitter finally lost patience with the antics of self-promoting man-baby Milo Yiannopoulos and banned him permanently, The Great Man did not take it well. He was the victim, they would regret it, this was an assault on free speech, his rights were being infringed, all the usual victimhood soundbites were deployed. It didn’t work. Yiannopoulos remains on the Twitter banned list. There is no way back.
Been locked out, have you? Aw DIDDUMS!
This created a dilemma for his current platform among the unappealing convocation of the terminally batshit otherwise known as Breitbart, which only gets its propaganda out there by the kinds of self-promoting use of Twitter which Yiannopoulos had, in his own inimitable style, made his own. Somehow, the banning had to be portrayed as bad for Twitter, as well as being framed to make them the aggressor and Yiannopoulos, again, the victim.
The Breitbart opportunity came when Twitter posted its latest quarterly results: although, as CNBC told, “The company posted second-quarter adjusted earnings of 13 cents a share on revenue of $602 million. Wall Street expected it to post earnings of 10 cents a share on revenue of $607 million, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate. Profit per share was up from 7 cents a year earlier, and revenue rose 20 percent … Average monthly active users came in at 313 million, slightly higher than analyst estimates”, the figures were short of market expectations.
CNBC again: “The social media company said it expects third-quarter revenue of $590 million to $610 million, well below analyst expectations for $678 million … The company's shares dropped more than 10 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday”. Twitter shares were losing value - for Breitbart, that had to be down to the Yiannopoulos ban!
You think I jest? Here they came: “Twitter Shares Drop By 9% As Company Escalates War On Conservative Media” was the Breitbart headline. Yes, there are 313 million average active monthly users, Yiannopoulos had a following extending to 338,000 of them - or just over a tenth of one per cent. This was real Ron Hopeful stuff.
As Javier Hasse at Benzinga has pointed out, “Twitter Shares Have Historically Dropped 9% The Day After Earnings”. As the BBC reported, Twitter suffered a share price fall in the wake of last October’s results, and again in February this year. This reality, though, is not allowed to enter the fantasy world of Breitbart, where the notion is being spun that the latest figures mean Twitter could be the subject of a takeover bid.
Ben Kew’s post talks of “the site actively choosing to alienate conservative users by making clear their double standards in terms of censoring content”, such is the paranoia engendered by Yiannopoulos’ actions. But Kew’s actions are not a surprise: he is, after all, one of Yiannopoulos’ gofers, paid to tell the world great things about The Great Man.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Yiannopoulos is off Twitter for good, it isn’t affecting the platform’s revenue, and the blubbering Breitbarts need to get over it. Game over.
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