As if the wind had died down after a hurricane. Silence, light, breathing room – Twitter had banned President Trump from his platform. With that, January 8, 2021 had brought an abrupt end not only to the dozens of salvos fired daily from @realDonaldTrump, but also to the never-ending tail of news stories attached to these tweets.
Whoever opened the newspaper in the United States between 2015 and 2021 often saw three or four news items with ‘Trump’ in the headline on the front page. Many of those messages were traced to a presidential tweet.
Trump was, in his own words, “the Hemingway” of Twitter for years. He sent his first tweet on May 4, 2009. Twitter had about 18 million users at the time. The first messages were neutral and in the third person, as if they had been tapped by employees to announce that their boss would be on TV or radio somewhere. That’s what Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking write, who wrote for their book LikeWar (2018) analyzed all of Trump’s tweets to date.
They saw how things changed in 2011 — not coincidentally, the year Trump started actively spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii and thus should not be a US president. That year the number of tweets quadrupled, the following year again. According to Singer and Brooking, the tone also changed. He became more personal, that is, more insulting.
His Twitter following grew and so did his visibility outside of Twitter—and that was the lesson for Trump and politicians like him. He tweeted about the news and his tweets became new news. He got a lot of attention, and the people who tried to show that he is insane – and there have been many since he announced his candidacy for the presidency – overlooked that attention is mainly fuel for a political career.
As president, Trump would see his Twitter following grow to some 88 million followers and he served them with brusque policy announcements, insults from opponents and lots of untruths. Singer called him in an article from January 2021 “a super spreader”: “Trump was spectacularly effective in enticing others to spread his conspiracy theories.” It was made easy for him by social media algorithms, which prioritized messages that evoke a lot of emotions. .
It was also not easy for the social media companies to intervene, says political scientist Thomas Rid over the phone. Rid published in 2020 Active Measures, a history of disinformation campaigns by intelligence agencies of Russia and the United States. He sidesteps the question of whether there is a substantial difference between disinformation from foreign powers and that from domestic actors by pointing out the problem for the major platforms: “How can you lawfully intervene in the election campaign of one of the two political parties, without to violate freedom of expression?” In that sense, Trump’s ban from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram after the 2020 elections was an emergency stop.
Since then: a Trump-shaped void, on social and traditional media. What are the consequences of that? Do they resemble what Trump and others predicted at the time? And how is the void filled?
The most fanatics
Last Tuesday, Trump’s account made ‘POTUS 45 Statements’ a statement going out on the Gettr platform. The four-page annual overview of Donald Trump was shared by the most fanatics of his more than 55,000 followers on this medium on the far right side of the internet: 119 reposts, 266 likes in one day. An average score for this account: usually about 100 reposts and 300 thumbs up. About 1,500 less than before on Twitter, when his tweets easily got 400,000 likes and 150,000 retweets.
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Trump’s threats to Twitter and then CEO Jack Dorsey after his ban have not come true. Twitter has not been deflated, but has grown to almost 400 million users in 2021, more than 40 million more than in 2020.
Gettr, Gab, Rumble and Parler were all platforms that wanted to fill the hole on the right. But Parler had to shut down for a month in January when Amazon Web Services stopped hosting the site. Gab was troubled by hackers. Gettr and Rumble are minuscule compared to Twitter and Facebook. The favorite platform of Trump supporters is the digital messaging service Telegram, downloaded almost a billion times from the app store.
In the meantime, where is the own social platform that the former president and his employees have been announcing all year? In October, Truth Social’s web address was briefly open, long enough to allow trolls to sign up as @donaldtrump or have a picture of a shitting pig posted by Trump’s own account. Since then, Trump has been in a legal battle with the stock exchange regulator, who wants to know how the company’s financing works.
After the Trump bump
For all his insults at traditional media as “enemy of the people,” Trump also had a prediction for CNN, Washington Post, New York Times etc.: you’ll miss me, because when I’m gone, your audience will run away too. All of those news organizations had benefited from what has been called the “Trump Bump,” a spike in viewership and readership since Trump became president in 2015. They campaigned against Trump. „The truth is essential”, became the slogan of The New York Times.
Since Joe Biden’s election victory, the tension of that battle between Trump and the press has evaporated, and indeed it has. consequences for viewing and reading figures. The ratings of the cable news CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — which are sharply politically oriented — have been decimated by 38, 34 and 25 percent, respectively, on the weekday eve. At the old networks ABC, CBS and NBC, the turnover is smaller, but still clear: between 12 and 14 percent on their news broadcasts.
The Washington Post and The New York Times have lost a large part of their online audience: 28 and 15 percent respectively between October 2020 and October 2021.
For the political news follower, every year after the presidential election is considerably less exciting, let alone when the elections are portrayed as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil by the candidates and by the media. NewsWhip, a company that analyzes news consumption, compared the interest in political articles online. In 2020, they saw that 14 million articles were viewed an average of 924 times each. The 13.5 million political articles of 2021 were each viewed an average of 321 times.
If Trump joins in 2024
It raises the question of what will happen on (social) media if Donald Trump decides to participate in the 2024 elections. And how the media will behave in that case. Media professor Jay Rosen is passionate about this. According to him, major news organizations heaved a sigh when Trump disappeared from the White House and have continued their work as usual: reporting news in the most balanced way possible. “But that is no longer possible,” says Rosen. “There is no real balance now that either side has embraced a lie that endangers democracy.”
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From the moment it became clear that he would lose the presidency, Trump has done everything to sow mistrust in the election. And very effective. A whole recent poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst showed that 71 percent of Republicans don’t think Joe Biden is (probably or definitely) not the rightful president of the United States. Even more alarmingly, nearly a third of independent voters surveyed feel the same way.
Here Rosen always quotes Trump’s ex-advisor, now talk radio host, Steve Bannon: “Flood the zone with shit.” The press is the real opponent, Bannon believed, the politician must fill the media landscape with shit.
The traditional attitude of the media is powerless against this strategy. Giving about the same amount of attention to the opposing statements of the rival parties – pointless, as long as one of those parties is lying to cause chaos. “Journalists from left-wing media say: then we should be more critical of what the Republican politicians say. Pointless. It doesn’t help to say they are lying. Their strategy is not to convince people that a lie is the truth. Their strategy is to make it impossible to tell lies from the truth.”
What attitude, then, should serious media take during the 2024 presidential campaign, regardless of whether Trump becomes a candidate himself or a Trump clone? “It’s counter-intuitive for journalists, but ignoring stories these politicians want to spread can help. Or at least raising the threshold for a piece in the newspaper.”
No matter how critical you write about it, any kind of attention is oxygen for a lie. “And if you write critically about it,” Rosen says, “you give the great leader another reason to say, ‘Do you see how much they hate me? And that’s because they you hate.'”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 3, 2022
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