I remember when Trump first won, the American-centered part of the web I would occasionally stop by seemed completely infiltrated with MAGA trolls. You had this feeling people thought it was edgy and fun - the worst kind of cultural moment seemed to be happening.
This time around I’m not so much on mainstream social media. And when I do check them out, it seems hard to understand what the vibe is as most content is AI or from professional content creators.
The closest thing I see to Trump supporters these days seems to be the enablers who endlessly repeat how they won’t vote for Harris for some dumb reason or another - they simply cannot vote for a black woman president because it’s not progressive enough, and all that jazz. But I don’t ever see Trump supporters.
Of course they exist still. I have just chose social media platforms strategically to avoid toxic people.
So I’m wondering if the same enthusiasm for Trump that seemed to be boiling online in 2016 is still there today, and if this election only feels different because I’m self-selected into saner platforms. Or if it is really different this time around.
I get that it’s an incredibly difficult question to answer, but I would love perspectives from people who have kept up an active use of mainstream social media, or otherwise have some insights I lack.
I dont know I think the crowds have been mostly siloed away from each other.
Try going on truth social, if you dare.
But who knows how much of that is bot traffic and LLMs.
🤷♂️
I can’t even enter Truth Social from Europe. I see Wikipedia estimates 600 000 monthly active users, which is of course a lot. But I struggle to wrap my head around how important it can be. Isn’t it potentially a bit self defeating for them to close themselves off in a closed forum?
The Trump subreddit in 2016 seemed to have a cultural impact. Truth Social seems to be more of a footnote?
In a way Twitter is bad enough, but my impression there before deleting my account was that most of the Trump spam was Musk posts that appeared on my profile for no good reason.
MAGA is a cult, so they all congregate in the same places. They all complain about the same things and can’t handle opposition much. Only the super crazy people follow him blindly. The semi-intelligent have realized he has done nothing for them.
Not when that closed forum acts like a circlejerking echo chamber where their cult leader can spew whatever he wants without consequences.
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I find this to be incredibly interesting. It’s like 2016 saw online polarization, but it happened on the same platforms. Today, there’s a polarizations of platforms - we exist in different realities online.
I wonder if this split would have happened anyway, or if it was motivated by American politics. And I wonder what the consequences are.
It seems like a pretty fundamental development in how our information channels work, and I haven’t seen it been discussed much by commentators.
Maybe my question cannot be answered because ‘online’ today just means something completely different than it did in 2016.