I can shed a tiny bit of light on this — the courts won’t force Trump to leave on replies. I was one of the people Trump was forced to unblock, so I know the legal reasoning very, very well. The case was decided on the basis that, once the White House confirmed his tweets were official statements, he couldn’t block some American citizens from accessing them. That argument doesn’t work for replies — if he turns off replies for everyone, there’s no discrimination.

Twitter can spin this in a million different ways, but this turns the service into a perfect propaganda machine for the president. He can post anything he wants and no one can directly refute him. Even with a verified account and a decent number of followers, this shuts me up as effectively as blocking me.