FORMER CIA AGENT WANTS TO BUY TWITTER TO BAN PRESIDENT TRUMP FROM TWEETING

I’ve often wondered what would happen if Twitter went bust or took its moderation responsibilities seriously: would it be a good or a bad thing for President Donald Trump? The question is kind of moot: the company’s CEO has made it pretty clear that he has no intention of banning the president from the platform, and why would he? Twitter is struggling, and Trump is one of the few surefire ways the company has of making money. If the leader of the free world triggers a nuclear war via hashtag, then that’s just the price of doing business.

But what if the site were bought out by someone who wanted to actually enforce its terms of service? Valerie Plame Wilson – a former CIA operations officer – is hoping to find out, via a crowdfund.

“Twitter is a publicly traded company. Shares = power,” writes Plame Wilson on the GoFundMe page. “This GoFundMe will fund the purchase of a controlling interest in Twitter.”

To be clear, this isn’t your average Kickstarter looking for a few hundred dollars: to get a controlling share in the platform, Plame Wilson is seeking a whopping $1 billion – and even that seems unlikely to convince Twitter to slaughter its egotistical cash cow, given Twitter was hoping to sell for between $18 and $30 billion just a year ago.

And, as things stand, even raising a billion dollars feels like a longshot. At the time of writing, Plame Wilson has raised just over $33,000 (though that figure has gone up by several hundred dollars while I’ve been writing). The current disconnect between the target and the amount raised prompted a fairly dismissive statement from the White House which told the LA Times that the relatively small pot demonstrated that the American people secretly love Trump’s use of Twitter. “Her ridiculous attempt to shut down his First Amendment is the only clear violation and expression of hate and intolerance in this equation,” the statement continued.