New data shows how drastically online mentions of Trump declined in the wake of his social media bans

In the wake of Donald Trump's bans from social media, namely Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, his lack of presence is definitely being noticed. As Shirin Ghaffary and Rani Molla point out in an article for Recode this Thursday, many are realizing just how little people have been talking about Trump.

According to data obtained by Recode, talk of Trump went down by 34 percent on Twitter and 23 percent on Facebook the week after he was banned from both platforms after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. "Since then, Trump mentions have continued to decline around 90 percent on both platforms from where they were the week of the riots," Recode reports.

"Of course, it's impossible to divorce the decline in the Trump conversation from the fact that he's no longer president. It's natural for people to talk less about a world leader once he or she is no longer in office," Ghaffary and Molla write. "Even before the bans, mentions of Trump had started to drop after he lost the election. But Trump wasn't an ordinary president, and he'd made it very clear he planned to continue being present in political discourse after his loss — as evidenced by his posts inciting Capitol rioters."

With Trump considering another White House run, he launched a new page on his website where he pledges to present information to voters "straight from the desk of Donald J Trump."

But he no doubt misses the social media megaphone that allowed him to dominate news cycles and impulsively blast his message to more than 100 million followers.

"To be clear, if you are Trump and you want to have influence in 2022 and 2024 -- and possibly run for office in 2024 -- it is better to be on social media than not," Professor Joshua Tucker, co-director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics, told AFP.

With additional reporting from AFP