The Trolls’ Comeuppance
It’s called “take inflation.” Social media encourages take inflation, and take inflation morphs our politics because it can create a false sense of consensus around ideas that seem popular online but are not in real life.
Key points
- This reversed the dynamic Chait identified in 2019: It is now politicians on the right who find their perceptions skewed by what draws approval on social media and their efforts to tailor their personas to appeal to that audience.
- If you’re looking for an explanation for why conservatives were shocked that Democrats routed Republicans in the midterms, flipping seats and states that haven’t gone blue in generations, this is a good place to start.
- When Musk first took over Twitter, I worried that Americans would become trapped in an “algorithmic cage” —that right-wing ownership would allow Trump allies to control what Americans saw and heard, and as a result, shape their understanding of reality.
In 2019, my now-colleague Jonathan Chait presciently argued that Joe Biden would win the Democratic primary despite his age because he was the least-online candidate and therefore unlikely to support such policies.
Additional details
- In the end, however, the former is looking for engagement and the latter for votes, and those interests can diverge—leaving politicians chasing engagement while not realizing they are shedding voters.
- If you were spending hours on X, you might have believed that most Americans were delighted by cruel memes celebrating deportations, or that affordability issues were a “hoax,” as President Trump kept insisting, or that a “red wave” was inevitable.
- In his book on the attention economy, The Siren’s Call, Chris Hayes observes that social media takes something essential to the human experience—our desire for attention and recognition—and monetizes it.
- In Ohio, for example, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, got a lot of attention for an ad that accused his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about being abused as a child by her stepfather.
- One MAGA poster said Skywalker, who becomes a mass murderer after rightly being denied a promotion, was emblematic of “the white male experience.” If you say so!
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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