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NY Times Op-Ed, Mar. 31 2016
Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere
by Zeynep Tufekci
EVERY morning since August, I have steeled myself to enter an alternate
universe. I scroll through social media feeds where people are convinced
that Congress funds the Islamic State, that our president hates this
country and wants it to fail and that Donald J. Trump is the only
glimmer of hope in this bleak landscape.
It’s my look at a list of Twitter users whom I’ve identified as Trump
supporters. Some accounts have only a few followers while some have tens
of thousands. (No one comes close to Mr. Trump himself, at more than
seven million.) They include people of many professions and backgrounds.
I found them by reading at responses to news media or political
accounts, and then went on to seek out other accounts they followed.
It’s a large, sprawling network.
As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the
uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter. As I watched this election
season unfold, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the power of
the Trump social media echo chamber. What I’ve been reading has
surprised even my jaded eyes. It’s a world of wild falsehoods and some
truth that you see only rarely in mainstream news outlets, or hear
spoken among party elites.
It’s popular to argue today that Mr. Trump’s success is, in part, a
creation of the traditional news media — cable networks that couldn’t
get enough of his celebrity and the ratings it brought, and newspapers
that didn’t scrutinize him with enough care. There is some truth in
that, but the contention misses a larger reality.
Mr. Trump’s rise is actually a symptom of the mass media’s growing
weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable
to say.
For decades, journalists at major media organizations acted as
gatekeepers who passed judgment on what ideas could be publicly
discussed, and what was considered too radical. This is sometimes called
the “Overton window,” after Joseph P. Overton of the conservative
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who discussed the relatively narrow
range of policies that are viewed as politically acceptable. What such
gatekeepers thought was acceptable often overlapped with what those in
power believed, too. Conversations outside the frame of this window were
not tolerated.
For worse, and sometimes for better, the Overton window is broken. We
are in an era of rapidly weakening gatekeepers.
When I first came to this country from Turkey as a graduate student in
the late 1990s, I was something of an anomaly: an adult foreigner with
white skin who was fluent in English but not a native. Though I was a
newcomer culturally, many people in my new home, Austin, Tex., assumed I
was born and raised here. I have a bit of an accent, but my appearance
seemed to overwhelm their ear.
Curious about my new country, I soaked up conversations. Sometimes, they
went very, very wrong in ways I couldn’t understand.
It would go something like this: I would be chatting with a seemingly
nice person who would complain that a brother-in-law had lost a job. As
I sympathetically listened, there would be a brief, unrelated mention of
a black man who was hired for some other job. Just as I was squinting to
try to comprehend the point, a vile and thunderous racist rant would be
unleashed.
I ran back to my classmates who were born in this country, in horror,
wondering what had happened.
“Oh, you don’t know the code,” they told me with a laugh.
“The code” was their shorthand for how racists sent out feelers to find
kindred spirits. Since many people of all races opposed racism, racial
identity itself was no guarantee of agreement. I didn’t know the markers
of this “code,” so I sometimes failed to recognize them, or responded
inadequately to them.
Today, this feeling-out process happens online and is much quicker,
resulting in cascading self-affirmation. People naturally thrive by
finding like-minded others, and I watch as Trump supporters affirm one
another in their belief that white America is being sold out by secretly
Muslim lawmakers, and that every unpleasant claim about Donald Trump is
a fabrication by a cabal that includes the Republican leadership and the
mass media. I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one
another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.
After many months of observing Mr. Trump’s supporters online, I wanted
to see this phenomenon in person, so this month I attended a Trump rally
in
