Trump’s Evolution in Social-Media Exile: More
QAnon, More Extremes
The former president, now free to post again on
Facebook and Twitter, has increasingly amplified far-right accounts on Truth
Social. Experts on extremism worry that he will bring this approach to a far
wider audience.
Two years after he was kicked off most mainstream
social media sites, former President Donald J. Trump’s posts online have grown
only more extreme.
Ken
BensingerMaggie Haberman
By Ken
Bensinger and Maggie Haberman
Jan. 28,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/us/politics/trump-social-media-extremism.html
In
September, former President Donald J. Trump went on Truth Social, his social
network, and shared an image of himself wearing a lapel pin in the form of the
letter Q, along with a phrase closely associated with the QAnon conspiracy
theory movement: “The storm is coming.”
In doing
so, Mr. Trump ensured that the message — first posted by a QAnon-aligned
account — would be hugely amplified, visible to his more than four million
followers. He was also delivering what amounted to an unmistakable endorsement
of the movement, which falsely and violently claims that leading Democrats are
baby-eating devil worshipers.
Even as the
parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced this past week that Mr.
Trump would be reinstated — a move that followed the lifting of his ban from
Twitter, though he has not yet returned — there is no sign that he has
curtailed his behavior or stopped spreading the kinds of messages that got him
exiled in the first place.
In fact,
two years after he was banished from most mainstream social media sites for his
role in inciting the Capitol riot, his online presence has grown only more
extreme — even if it is far less visible to most Americans, who never use the
relatively obscure platforms where he has been posting at a sometimes
astonishing clip.
Since
introducing his social media website in February 2022, Mr. Trump has shared
hundreds of posts from accounts promoting QAnon ideas. He has continued to
falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen and that he is a victim of
corrupt federal law enforcement agencies. And he has made personal attacks
against his many perceived enemies, including private citizens whose names he
has elevated.
Now, Mr.
Trump’s increasingly probable return to major platforms raises the prospect
that he will carry over his more radicalized behavior to a far wider audience
on Facebook and Instagram, with a combined five billion active users, and
Twitter, with 360 million active users.
The
potential for such an outcome has alarmed extremism experts; pushed the
platforms to explain that they have installed “guardrails” to deter incendiary
posts; and prompted questions about how Mr. Trump’s assertions, long siloed in
a right-wing arena, are likely to play with mainstream voters, particularly as
a sizable share of his party signals that it is ready to move on.
“It’s not
that Trump has meaningfully changed the way he behaves online. In fact, he’s
grown more extreme,” said Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue who studies technology and extremism in the United States.
“I don’t think anybody should reasonably expect him to be any different if he’s
back on Facebook and Twitter. And when it comes to spreading conspiracy
theories, Trump is the big tuna.”
Last month,
as Meta considered whether to reinstate Mr. Trump, he wrote on Truth Social that
even the Constitution should not stand in the way of his return to power.
“A Massive
Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules,
regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he said.
.Steven
Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said on Thursday that “Truth Social has been
a success because President Trump has created a true free-speech platform,
unlike the Big Tech oligarchs who censor conservatives.” He added, “President
Trump should have never been banned on these social media platforms, and
everybody knows their decisions were unjust and ultimately destroyed the
integrity of our democracy.”
In a letter
sent this month to three top Meta officials, including Mark Zuckerberg, the
company’s chief executive, a lawyer for Mr. Trump argued that the ban had
“dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse.”
The
petition for reinstatement was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of
the decision to bar him from Facebook and Instagram, made one day after the
deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. At the time, the company said
his presence on its sites posed a risk to public safety.
Democrats
have said he’s still dangerous. Last month, four of the party’s members of
Congress urged Meta not to reinstate Mr. Trump, writing in a letter that he was
still “undermining our democracy.”
But on
Wednesday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs, wrote in a blog
post that “our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded.” He
added that the suspension was “an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary
circumstances” and that normally, “the public should be able to hear from a
former president of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office
again, on our platforms.”
To try to
stop Mr. Trump from provoking future unrest, Meta said, it would prevent
sharing of posts that, among other things, question the legitimacy of elections
or promote QAnon content. Violations of the company’s policies could also
result in his being blocked from the site again, Meta said. Conservatives
praised the decision, and the A.C.L.U. and Senator Bernie Sanders defended the
move.
Audience
members at a Trump rally in Ohio in September. His social media site, Truth
Social, is far more partisan than mainstream platforms: A Pew Research Center
study found that half of the site’s most influential accounts self-identified
as pro-Trump or right-wing.Credit...Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
No such
restrictions exist for Mr. Trump on Twitter, which had barred him soon after
the Capitol riot but reinstated him in November after Elon Musk, the company’s
new owner, conducted a public poll about a possible return.
Mr. Trump
also often handled his Twitter account directly, unlike his Facebook account.
He used the platform as a cudgel during his presidency, issuing a steady flow
of stream-of-consciousness thoughts, insults and policy declarations on the
fly.
He has been
talking to aides about when and what to post on Twitter upon his return,
according to two people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity.
The former
president delivered the first-ever post on Truth Social, in which he has a
significant financial stake, in February 2022, writing: “Get Ready! Your
favorite President will see you soon!”
He didn’t
return for more than two months, but the floodgates then opened, with Mr. Trump
Truthing and Retruthing — as posts and shares are called — dozens of times a
day.
On Aug. 31,
for example, he posted over 50 times, making wild claims about Hunter Biden’s
laptop, Dominion voting machines, and supposed links by President Biden and
Vice President Kamala Harris to Russia.
He has
often repeated lies about the 2020 election. This past week, he posted that his
infamous phone call seeking more votes in Georgia was “perfect” and that
officials had “cheated in many ways including STUFFING Ballots.”
If Mr.
Trump returns to major social media sites, Republican candidates and elected
officials — who spent his presidency dodging questions about his incendiary
tweets — are far likelier to be pressed for their opinions on what he says.
Mr. Trump
would also have to figure out how to manage his online presences.
According
to regulatory filings, he is obliged to place his posts exclusively on Truth
Social and to not share them elsewhere for six hours. That contract has a
significant exception, though, allowing him to post material “that specifically
relates to political messaging, political fund-raising or get-out-the vote
efforts at any time” on other sites.
To date,
Mr. Trump has not taken advantage of the loophole, posting exclusively to his
4.8 million followers on Truth Social and at times reposting that content to
his nearly 800,000 subscribers on Telegram.
Those
follower counts pale in comparison to his potential reach elsewhere. A Pew
Research Center analysis in October found that only 2 percent of Americans used
Truth Social or Telegram as a regular source for news, compared with 28 percent
for Facebook and 14 percent for Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s
own statistics underscore that difference. He has nearly 88 million Twitter
followers; his Facebook account has 34 million followers. His Instagram page,
which tended to focus more on family photos, has 23 million followers.
According
to people close to Mr. Trump, he is aware that a return to those platforms
would risk starving Truth Social of its largest draw. But it may be that his
desire for more income, they said, is outweighed by the enormous attention that
Facebook and Twitter can provide him as he runs again for president.
Rashad
Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a civil rights group, said Mr.
Trump’s outsize following could partly explain why Meta made its decision.
“Corporations
like Facebook have continued to find ways to profit off Trump even as they’ve
condemned him,” said Mr. Robinson, whose group has pressured Facebook to enact
policy changes through advertiser boycotts. “It’s not just that they let Donald
Trump back on their platform, it’s that they benefit from it.”
He and
others pointed to the fact that Mr. Trump’s campaign spent $89 million to
advertise on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 election, and $56 million
to advertise on Google and YouTube. (Google, which also suspended Mr. Trump
from YouTube in January 2021, has not announced plans to reinstate him.)
“Facebook
has more followers than Christianity,” Mr. Robinson said. “There is not really
a comparison point in terms of reach and advertising power.” Meta declined to
comment on Mr. Robinson’s criticism. But executives have in the past noted that
political advertising represents a tiny fraction of the company’s overall
revenue, and Meta has acknowledged tweaking its algorithm to downplay political
content over the past two years.
The Pew
social media study found that Truth Social was “heavily partisan,” with half of
its most influential accounts self-identifying as pro-Trump or right-wing.
In a
podcast interview in June, Kash Patel, an adviser to Mr. Trump and, at the
time, a director of the company that owns Truth Social, described the
proliferation of QAnon-friendly content on the site as a deliberate business
decision by the platform, which has struggled financially.
“We try to
incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences,” Mr.
Patel said. “You can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong
dominant following.”
While it is
possible that Mr. Trump will moderate his flow of extreme posts if he returns
to mainstream platforms, it is far from clear he will do so.
On
Wednesday, Mr. Trump showed no sign of slowing down, posting or reposting 19
times on Truth Social about the 2020 election, the news media and the end of
what he called his “deplatforming” from Facebook.
“Such a
thing should never happen again,” he wrote.
Ken
Bensinger is a Los Angeles-based politics reporter, covering right-wing media.
He is the author of “Red Card: How the U.S. Blew The Whistle On The World’s
Biggest Sports Scandal.” @kenbensinger
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
.webp)
