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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 Fayetteville, N.C.
I tried a few conversations that sought to challenge the attendees’
beliefs, but they went nowhere for a simple reason: His supporters and I
did not share the same factual universe. At one point, I heard Mr. Trump
declare that Congress had funded the Islamic State. I looked around,
bewildered, as there was no reaction from the crowd. My social media
forays confirm that even that was not an uncommon belief.
Mr. Trump doesn’t only speak outrageous falsehoods; he also voices
truths outside the Overton window that have been largely ignored,
especially by Republican elites. For example, academic research shows
that rather than deep cuts, Tea Party voters actually favor government
programs, as long as they perceive a benefit for themselves. It’s fairly
obvious that the current model of global trade provides a lot more
benefits to corporations than to workers, and yet it took Mr. Trump’s
rise to have this basic issue widely covered. In Fayetteville, Mr. Trump
complained that much of the military’s expensive weaponry had been
purchased simply because the large corporations selling it had political
clout. As he said this, the people around me, many of them from military
families, leapt to their feet in approval.
The demagogy that Mr. Trump deploys didn’t come out of nowhere, but was
encouraged by the Republican leadership. In 2012, Mitt Romney effusively
accepted Mr. Trump’s endorsement even though the tycoon had repeatedly
questioned President Obama’s citizenship. In this election, the
Republican Party may have hoped to engineer a controlled fire that would
burn only political opponents — the current president, say, or Democrats
as a whole, but not their preferred candidates. That’s a technique that
may have worked in the era of mass media. Instead, it now rages,
uncontrolled, on social media.
Many of the Trump supporters whom I’ve been following say that they no
longer trust any big institutions, whether political parties or media
outlets. Instead, they share personal stories that support their common
narrative, which mixes falsehoods and facts — often ignored by these
powerful institutions they now loathe — with the politics of racial
resentment.
Mr. Trump has been criticized for not conducting internal polling to
adjust his message, as major campaigns generally do. He does something
better, though. He uses Twitter as a kind of gut focus-group polling to
pick up and amplify messages that resonate. Also, while his rally
speeches may seem rambling, after having watched many, I believe he uses
crowd response to refine his message. He is not a bumbling celebrity; he
is a politician deeply in touch with his own, polarized base.
The Trump phenomenon is not simply a creation of newspaper columnists or
cable news bookers who initially thought his candidacy was a joke to be
exploited for ratings. His emergence shows the strength of his
supporters, united on social media, who believe that the media is a
joke. Mr. Trump and his fans have broken the Overton window, and there
is no going back.
Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the School of Information
and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a
contributing opinion writer.
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