Here’s something bizarre:
AOPA is the lobbying group for general aviation, especially piston peasants (the Gulfstreamers have NBAA). Their membership is down by about half over the past 20 years, which eviscerates their lobbying power. As the U.S. population booms via low-skill immigration (Pew), members of Congress don’t want to bother with orgs that don’t have at least 400,000 members. Why would they walk away from 85,000+ followers? My comment:
LinkedIn? Isn’t someone rich enough to own an aircraft supposed to be rich enough not to have to check LinkedIn regularly? TikTok? Are you sure that AOPA HQ staff have actually met a GA pilot? Did you hire some tween girls to run AOPA social media? Or maybe I missed the Garmin avionics partnership with Taylor Swift.
TikTok shows that they have only about 38,000 followers there. Similarly, they have fewer followers on LinkedIn than they do on X (about 61,000). I guess because GA pilots are so old, they do have over 200,000 followers on Facebook. But how tough is it to post at least the bigger stories on X simultaneously with the other social media systems? Presumably it can be done automatically, even without AI.
AOPA is important because, without them, any airport too small for a Pilatus PC-24 would be closed and turned into public housing for immigrants. Also, any aircraft smaller than a Phenom 300 would be excluded from ATC services so as to ensure plenty of capacity for the elite and the airlines.
Maybe California billionaires will step in and save AOPA. Democrat thought-leader Ro Khanna says they’ll be just as rich after a 5% haircut, which of course means that they can get another 5% haircut immediately afterwards and still be just as rich, which of course sets them up for Haircut #3… By the time the wise mandarins of Sacramento are finished, California’s Falcon 8X owners will be cut back to SR22-G2 fractional and, therefore, ready to join and support AOPA.
Can someone explain this? NPR sanctimoniously departed X during the Biden administration, but they had an endless river of taxpayer money to tap into and their loyal readers presumably got a lot of joy when they heard about Elon Musk being starved of traffic and ad revenue. But the typical AOPA member isn’t a progressive Democrat aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. How does AOPA benefit by leaving EAA, which already has twice as many members, as the dominant GA voice on X?
In the case the original tweet is memory-holed:
Nitter and other X instances are down. Probably some UI change or #Resisting? Lack of funding? Decided it was not worth it anymore (like 99% of cross-platform posting by companies and organizations)? Locked out of their account?
I tried to make an X account a year ago or so and the asinine account creation process stopped me. I think there were some puzzles and such which took about 10 minutes, and some were difficult (in the sense of needing to do something in a short time, or be very very precise) and it failed me twice, so I gave up. Facebook requires you to do a whole spherical video of your head to make a new account. Supposedly these stop scammers and bots, but do they?
“special interest groups are bad. Except when it’s my favorite special interest group. Then here is a detailed strategy on how they should survive and thrive.”