The Internet made Donald Trump

Democracies must fight back against social media, or perish

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The lesson of Donald Trump’s second inauguration is that he is an abomination – but not, as was once widely believed, an aberration. Trump’s electoral influence is enduring, and he is not alone. All over the world, liberal democracies are under assault, with the far right on the march and reactionary demagogues – miniature Trumps – winning elections. It’s as if a dangerous wind is blowing everywhere at once. But why? What has changed, so recently and universally?

Belatedly, Joe Biden seemed to understand. In his farewell speech last week, Biden issued a sharp warning: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.”

He continued: “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.” Explicitly referring to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning nearly 65 years ago about a "military-industrial complex," Biden pointed to a "tech-industrial complex" that threatened the nation.

Biden’s language might sound alarmist to some. It may seem absurd to treat Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube as an existential threat to democratic institutions. But there’s a reason the owners of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok all got front-row seats at the Trump inauguration. These apps, and the digital information economy they dominate, are the true secret of Trump’s power and influence. They are the force driving modern society headlong into chaos.

Contest for Liars

In the past two decades, humanity has created a massive, worldwide digital infrastructure for sharing ideas and information. It has crept into every corner of our lives, and most of us are exposed to it for many hours a day. It’s always been true that politics and markets were dominated by whichever ideas spread widest and furthest. But the internet, we're learning, privileges some ideas over others. Conspiracy theory, demagoguery, bigotry, lies, and hysteria all thrive online. And like some kind of deadly virus adapting to a new host, a new kind of political movement has evolved to take advantage of the modern information ecosystem: far-right populism.

This new political virus has spread across the planet, seemingly inexorably. It has pushed global politics in a bizarre, resentful direction and threatened to collapse governing institutions that have functioned in relative peace and stability for many years. Country after country has produced clownish national leaders who seem to simultaneously function as internet memes and extremist politicians, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the UK, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In European countries, far-right parties like France’s National Rally and Germany’s AfD have slowly climbed in popularity over years, despite repeated scandals and unpopular extremist agendas. And the trend is again peaking in the United States, with the second election of a man whose basic incoherency and unfitness once made him inconceivable as any sort of political leader.

For a while, it was hard to tell why politics had simultaneously jumped off the rails in so many different places. But with the passage of time, many suspected culprits in extremism’s rise have been exonerated. The economic shocks of the global financial crisis were a generation ago. Demagogues were already ascendant before the COVID pandemic, and before post-COVID inflation. Powerful right-wing propaganda channels in the United States, like Fox News, might play a role but can hardly explain an international trend. And while the world has faced challenges, it’s undergone nothing nearly as wrenching as the economic depression or world war that preceded the last far-right surge a century ago. Nonetheless, a suspiciously similar brand of far-right grievance has continued to advance, across linguistic and cultural barriers, in places as different as Brazil, India, South Korea, and the United States.

Unlike other economic and social dislocations, which are bounded in time and place, the evolution of modern media, and the rapid migration of the public’s attention to the internet, have been universal, continuous, and ongoing across virtually the entire globe. It’s time to take seriously the possibility that it’s our new digital media system that’s the fundamental cause of it all – the poison that’s killing democracy. The true villains of modern history may be the social media overlords, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg above all, who have stripped away any fetters on far-right lies and demagoguery.

The internet represents a dramatic departure from the media ecosystems of the past, more than is commonly acknowledged. For most of the 20th century, anyone who wanted to learn about the world outside his or her immediate surroundings had to rely heavily on institutional media outlets. Although imperfect, sources like TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers typically incorporated some kind of editorial process, usually including fact-checking. Media institutions were expensive to operate at a large scale and had to worry about protecting their public reputations. The majority of information reaching the public mind passed through one of these channels.

As a result, ideas that circulated among the public bore some passing resemblance to reality. If you wanted to learn about things like the president, an upcoming election, some distant country, or the state of the economy nationwide, you were forced – through lack of options as much as anything else – to rely on a source that was carefully compiled, fact-checked, and under the conscious editorial control of professional journalists.

Today, people spend more time-consuming media than ever before. We are surrounded by screens: at home, at work, and in our pockets. The defining feature of modern life is the penetration of media into almost every waking minute. The average American spends something like six hours on the internet each day, with almost half of those dedicated to social media. For comparison, that's far more time than the average three hours a day spent watching TV. In many other nations, time spent online is similar or even higher. We are surrounded by internet media, and much of our communication with each other and the outside world passes through it.

But online media doesn't work like traditional media. Online, there are few fact-checkers and little editorial processes. Rather than relying on staid institutions like the New York Times or ABC News, ideas and information can come from anywhere. In the past, a media outlet needed significant capital and multiple employees to reach even a local audience. Today, anyone who can afford a phone and an internet connection has a potential audience that includes, quite literally, the majority of America.

This may sound like a welcome, democratizing change. But consider which ideas spread fastest online: not the ones that are most accurate, but the ones that receive the most attention. Especially on social media, feeds are dominated by whichever idea, claim, or meme is going viral at a given moment. This is almost tautologically true, in fact: since social media lacks any traditional "front page" under the conscious control of an editor, an individual's feed is disproportionately populated by the most popular posts and subjects. The more viral it is, the more people will see it; the more people will see it, the more viral it is.

Over time, we have learned perhaps the key principle of internet virality: angry people click more. Audiences will frenetically consume information and rhetoric that provokes strong emotions, especially negative emotions. People feel compelled to share material that frightens them, enrages them, or makes them feel resentful. They particularly share material that validates their own beliefs, biases, and prejudices. Very often, in practice, this means ideas that capitalize on existing social resentments and frictions – searing claims about immigrants, nonwhite people, or stigmatized minorities are a reliable hit. Conspiracy theories also do well, exploiting fear and distrust of institutions to evoke a poisonous rage.

This has turned large swaths of the internet into little more than a contest for liars.

After all, online, who cares if claims are true or not, as long as people share them? The social and financial rewards of online attention are barely reduced when the underlying claim is false. Indeed, truth-tellers are at a massive disadvantage on the internet since they're forced to compete with wild, hysterical, or completely manufactured material that has been engineered specifically to attract notice and be shared. Many people have persisted in publishing true facts anyway – but they often sink out of sight, occluded by the more viral claims of skilled fabulists.

A Mass Hallucination Factory

The power of truly viral ideas is almost beyond imagination. Memes can spread nationwide, reaching hundreds of millions of people in a matter of hours. They can drive clothing trends, music trends, and mint enormous fortunes. Arguably, the richest man on Earth is primarily a beneficiary of becoming a meme: Elon Musk’s worth is driven by his Tesla stock, a company that is by any normal measure ludicrously overvalued but which attracts investment largely because of its association with Musk himself. Is it really so far-fetched to wonder if viral ideas can equally distort the public’s political preferences?

What’s worse, if an idea is exciting enough to go viral, no one ever needs to confront the difficult question of whether it’s true. Online, there are communities of belief for every claim. Rather than grapple with the unsettling possibility that they might be wrong, audiences can simply find a source to reassure them that they’re right. Think back, for example, to how difficult it was to refute disinformation about ivermectin and other quack remedies during the COVID pandemic. Adherents could “do their own research” – meaning, in practice, retreating to forums where these conspiracy theories were considered entirely correct, and even beyond debate. Online, a reader or viewer is never forced to tolerate the discomfort of testing their beliefs against hard reality.

The incentive to tell listeners exactly what they want to hear, felt by any author when their potential audience has other options, is most severe on social media. Millions of authors compete for attention on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The winners of that competition are usually the ones who best reaffirm the feelings of their viewers and readers. The incentive to play to the crowd’s strongest emotions is overwhelming, and the penalty for lying is nonexistent. Having scruples about telling the truth simply ensures that you’ll be outcompeted in the battle for attention by the people who have none.

In the past, critics have frequently referred to “information bubbles” online. But the metaphor is not quite apt. Online audiences are not really stuck in a propaganda narrative, unable to escape. Instead, they have been presented with a kind of information buffet, where they can pick and choose their favored narratives. By selecting the sources they find most agreeable – from an almost infinite number of options – internet audiences become willing co-conspirators in their own deception.

Lately, social media sites have made the problem worse by adding aggressive algorithms that figure out a user’s interests and deliver content to match. To extend the buffet analogy, it is as if a waiter was determining what you like best and delivering it directly to your table, further reducing any need to grapple with the thorny question of what to believe.

Even traditional media outlets have been dragged into the orbit of online and social media platforms. After all, traditional media competes for eyeballs with the internet. If TikTok is winning viewers by telling Zoomers what they want to hear, the New York Times and NBC might feel inclined to win them back by doing the same thing. At a minimum, this places subtle pressure on outlets to not contradict their audiences’ beliefs. But traditional media has become more open about their desire to cater to audiences’ preexisting beliefs. Consider the Washington Post’s recent promise to refocus on “Riveting storytelling for all of America” – a statement widely interpreted as indicating that the paper will become friendlier to Trump voters. As our media ecosystem fragments further and audiences have more options, a commitment to factual accuracy becomes a severe market vulnerability.

In short: today’s internet has become a kind of mass hallucination factory. On social media, ideas spread widely simply because they are emotionally compelling or evocative. Through mass repetition, ludicrous fictions can become accepted as true. Once this happens, disabusing anyone of a dearly-held falsehood is nearly impossible. The internet and social media have shoved humanity into the Age of the Meme, where our minds are dominated by ideas – regardless of truth or accuracy – that are tailored to spread like wildfire among massive communications networks where a great bulk of humanity spends over a third of their waking hours.

One could imagine the major online platforms trying to correct this dynamic and insert some truth into the discourse. They could, for instance, crack down on the sharing of overtly false information. In the past, social media companies attempted to do so (usually under political pressure). Unfortunately, this is difficult and expensive, and puts platforms at a disadvantage with their competitors. After all, if Facebook is publishing boring truth, but TikTok is publishing exciting lies, where are audiences going to migrate? Over time, online fact-checking has been largely abandoned. And in recent years the situation has gotten much worse. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he removed essentially all content moderation; Mark Zuckerberg recently eliminated Facebook and Instagram's fact-checking programs. These changes were defended on the explicitly political grounds of allowing false claims to compete with true claims in a marketplace of ideas.

Where the Extreme Right Thrives

That returns us to the political question. If this is the information ecosystem where humans spend most of their time, what sort of political ideas will reach them? The obvious answer is the ideas that flow most freely through online channels: rage, conspiracy, resentment, and hysteria.

What we have seen is that the politicians and political movements that have prospered since the rise of social media are indeed the ones willing to fully indulge in these negative emotions. Political stars like Trump have risen to immense power based on their talent for attracting attention – usually by fostering rage, conspiracy, resentment, and hysteria. The internet isn’t just elevating existing political forces, it is constructing new ones, particularly from people who are willing to subordinate ideological consistency and coherence to the rhetorical imperatives of internet virality.

Or put more simply, if you’re a national figure willing to say whatever it takes to get people upset and blow up online, you can reach many, many voters, and probably get yourself elected.

This process has not been limited to the right. There has been a noticeable growth in perpetually aggrieved anti-establishment leftism, especially in online circles. But anyone willing to fully conform their politics to the imperative of going viral will eventually delve into the potent social resentments of race, gender, and sexuality. In doing so, they will inevitably find their politics pushed towards the far right.

So it’s little surprise that the extreme right has been the most successful political offspring of the internet. A toxic stew of online resentment – against any group that can be targeted with sufficiently poisonous memes – has cohered into a worldwide political movement. That movement has mostly avoided existing politicians or even clear policy commitments. Instead, it has relied on a sort of inchoate mass discontent and elevated leaders like Trump – political celebrities more known for their attention-grabbing personas than any previous expertise or success. Sometimes, this movement has taken over preexisting parties, like the GOP. When it does, traditional conservatives are forced to convert to populist radicalism, or face de facto expulsion from power.

As we’ve seen with Trump’s about-face on the TikTok ban, far-right figures who succeed in this environment are willing to do anything to stay the center of attention. Trump freely switched from supporting the ban to championing the app – willing to adapt to whatever is new and shiny if it helps him.

Over time, the process has intensified. Old resentments and outrages start to seem tame and dull, necessitating new extremes. The far right’s obsessions today are almost a caricature of their obsessions even a few years ago – which, at the time, seemed themselves like a caricature of conservatism. Trump’s border wall with Mexico has mutated into a call to annex half of North America. A fixation with “political correctness” has escalated into an open campaign to drive people of color out of positions of power as “DEI” hires. Campaigns to reduce online “censorship” of hate speech have been replaced with efforts to install neo-Nazi and fascist parties at the head of major European countries. The Tea Party seems quaint in an age where unrepentant white nationalists are a fixture in right-wing politics.

Behind it all is a faint air of unreality – a sense that there’s something hallucinatory about this mode of politics, disconnected from real-world cause and effect. This is because it’s not a manifestation of long-held beliefs or material conditions, but a product of the online radicalization game. Ever-more-extreme new ideas are created to milk every last drop of rage from the public’s darkest resentments, and in doing so, steal back a little bit of social media attention.

Bluntly, this is not sustainable. No functional institution designates as true whichever idea excites people the most, precisely because it risks this sort of radicalization loop. Modern society relies on stable systems of public knowledge, to carefully adjudicate which ideas are true, and then spread and act on them. Social media and the internet are dissolving many of those systems. Fascism scholar Robert Paxton wrote that fascist societies, with their need for eternal ideological escalation against new enemies, “drive towards a final paroxysm of self-destruction.” We’re not there yet, but you can see it from here.

If modern liberal democracies are going to survive, they need to answer this threat. They need to go to war with social media and the tech oligarchs who oversee it. We cannot have a society governed by mass hallucination.

Liberals Need to Understand Their Enemy

To his credit, Joe Biden seems to be one of the first leaders to recognize what’s happening. To our misfortune, he seems to have figured out the problem far too late, at the nadir of his power. Most mainstream parties and politicians, even Biden’s fellow Democrats, still cannot see the source of the threat. They have made feeble efforts to reduce the corrosive incentives to spread misinformation online, or pressure existing platforms to monitor the spread of false, extremist ideas.

Nothing has illustrated this blindspot more profoundly than Musk’s takeover of Twitter. In 2022 Musk was already an outspoken proponent of right-wing politics, and Twitter held a unique role as a global online political hub. Still, Democrats barely blinked at the months-long process of negotiating the company’s sale. Even when Musk attempted to back out of his purchase, liberal leaders mostly gloated at the mess he’d gotten himself into, rather than attempt to prevent the takeover of a critical online institution. Biden administration officials openly downplayed the purchase as of minor importance.

Fast forward two years, and Musk has fully weaponized the site to tremendous effect. He has reintroduced neo-Nazis and extremists to the public discourse, demonized liberals, and bludgeoned European allies by promoting their far-right fringe parties. It seems likely that Musk’s takeover helped reelect Donald Trump. Many Democrats who scoffed at the idea that Twitter could ever affect real life now seem cowed by the conspiracy theories and attacks that Musk has launched from his platform.

Yet, ironically, Musk himself illustrates that it is the power and pervasiveness of social platforms that constitute the fundamental danger. After seizing control of Twitter, Musk has seemed to spend more and more time on it, interacting with the groups that validated him most freely. Those were often members of the extreme right, including no shortage of neo-Nazis. During this time, Musk’s own politics have noticeably veered towards the furthest right-wing fringe. He may be the richest man in the world, but he is not immune to the basic psychological loop of reaffirmation and radicalization – the same loop that the internet has inflicted on tens of millions of ordinary men and women. Musk is, in some respects, just a normal MAGA dead-ender: someone who logged on to the internet with a familiar set of buried prejudices, and found himself transformed into a far-right radical, advocating for some of the worst ideas in history.

Anyone who claims to know where this is all headed is lying. Here’s what we can say for sure, though. No matter how malleable truth feels in the hallucination chamber of social media, the real world is still out there. In the modern information ecosystem, it’s easy to ignore the risks of foolish policy and catastrophically unfit leaders; nonetheless, those risks exist. Voters might be in thrall to online delusion, sending our political systems speeding towards a head-on collision with hard reality. But reality always gets the last word. We must figure out a way to sort fact from fiction in the public mind. Americans can go online and tell ourselves the cliff-edge isn’t real, but the internet won’t catch us when we walk over it.