Trump's tweets are famous. But this is the Facebook
presidency.
He’s trapped in a bubble defined by his own
likes and clicks. And we’re all stuck in it with him.
By Jacob Silverman
Jacob Silverman is the author of "Terms of Service: Social
Media and the Price of Constant Connection."
September 4, 2020 at 8:33 a.m. CDT
Interviewed
by Laura Ingraham on Fox News recently, President Trump cited a false statistic that only
6 percent of covid-19 deaths were due to the disease itself. Gently pushed
by Ingraham, he hedged slightly, calling it “an interesting statistic,” thus
moving into the hazy well-it-could-be-true epistemological territory in which
Trump and his followers thrive.
This
is, by now, a familiar way of proceeding — not so much a strategy of press
manipulation as Trump’s way of being in the world. When he is not outright
dissembling, as he does often,
the president impulsively finger-paints his own reality, assembling a worldview
from bits of information drawn from disparate advisers, adoring cable news
personalities, golf buddies, social media feeds and his strange brain, which,
he assured us recently, definitely did not suffer “a series of mini-strokes” last year.
Sometimes,
Trump’s comments are inscrutably abstract, but occasionally they can be
rendered intelligible — or at least traced back to some original source.
Regarding the 6 percent figure, Daniel Dale, CNN’s diligent
Trump-checker, spelled out the chain of illogic: “The
statistic went from a Facebook post to a QAnon person’s tweet to an article on
the bonkers website Gateway Pundit citing the QAnon person’s tweet to Trump
campaign advisor Jenna Ellis.” In that relay race through the Internet, we can
see some of the hallmarks of Trump’s knowledge web — Facebook, QAnon, Twitter,
a right-wing news outlet, a like-minded adviser who also reads fringe media and
traffics in misinformation. What do they have in common? A willingness among
participants to believe anything that satisfies their ideological or political
priorities.
Trump
is not a Facebook user, but he thinks like one, absorbing a confused mess of
conspiracy theories, misinformation, random factoids, bad memes and racist
rumors playing on the fears of the day. It might be more accurate to equate him
to Facebook itself: His mind is ruled by black-box algorithms. But as with the
social network’s news feed and recommendation systems, we can observe certain
tendencies — especially toward extremism and an emphasis on the latest
salacious news, its truth being secondary to its utility. Like Facebook, with
its almighty metrics of likes and shares, Trump thinks only in terms of ratings. Popularity is a
proxy for truth. A viral piece of misinformation isn’t a lie; it’s something
“more and more people are talking about,” so the president should, too. His is,
in effect, the first Facebook presidency, less a conventional
authoritarian regime than an untamed information ecosystem in
which the head of state drinks from the same toxic wellsprings of
misinformation and extremism as the rest of us, while lacking any skepticism or
self-awareness. As a result, a Facebook-originated rumor that reinforces his
prejudices is far more valuable, more believable, than the informed expertise
of credentialed bureaucrats or the privileged knowledge of the intelligence
community.
The
horror of Trump’s Facebook brain is that we all have to live with it. It
creates policy, spreads deceit, defines speech standards on social media and
drives the daily news cycle through its ever-multiplying absurdities. By the
standards of today’s journalism, each ridiculously false statement must be
taken seriously, at least outside of sycophantic Trumpist media outposts like
Fox News and OAN. As a result, we have a flourishing fact-checking industry and
a lengthy record of Trump’s falsehoods — and no way to curb his behavior or
persuade the bulk of his supporters to adopt a healthy skepticism.
Today,
it is easy to believe whatever one wants and to surround oneself with a cocoon
of reinforcing opinion. Like Facebook, Trump’s brain creates alternate
informational realities in which there’s room to believe anything. A perfect
solipsist, Trump has faith only in himself and what he knows — or at least,
what he’s heard and chosen to believe. In that way, he’s like a Facebook user
trapped in a bubble defined by his own likes and clicks, along with the
platform’s recommendation systems that have one main purpose: to keep him
engaged.
In that
same interview with Ingraham, Trump described a supposed planeload
of “thugs,” clad in black and headed to a major city to cause
mayhem. When pressed, the president became evasive and said more information
would follow. NBC’s Ben Collins traced the obviously fake
story to a June 1 Facebook post that described a flight from Seattle to Boise,
Idaho, carrying “at least a dozen” men dressed in black. The post had been
shared more than 3,000 times and had been picked up by militant groups. It was
also, as Collins noted, in line with numerous other viral posts promising
invasions of antifa sympathizers that invariably never materialized.
Subsequent reporting from the Daily Beast suggested
that Trump’s anecdote might have been based on something similar that Rep.
Devin Nunes (D-Calif.) had said about a flight he took to Washington. Here, as
on Facebook, the branching, associative chains are at once intuitively clear
and hard to follow. You liked (or “liked”) one thing, so maybe you’ll also like
this thing that’s sort of similar. The connective tissue of Facebook is rumor
and urban legends, like old-fashioned chain letters, or email forwards, except
these find their way to the president’s addled mind and not just your
grandparents’ shared inbox.
A key
problem with Trump’s Facebook brain is that when he says something absurd, his
advisers and handlers endeavor to make it a reality, often by posting
supportive remarks on social media or filming spot interviews designed to go
viral. And so, when asked on CNN about outside agitators flying en masse, Attorney General William P. Barr said: “There
were many on planes. We’ve received multiple reports.” He didn’t offer any
evidence. In the same interview, Barr advanced the unsubstantiated claim that
Jacob Blake was armed when he was shot in Kenosha, Wis., and said he wasn’t sure whether
it was illegal to vote more than once in some states. (Trump had recently suggested that supporters try to
stuff ballot boxes to test voting systems.)
Like
Facebook’s beleaguered content moderators, America’s
fact-checkers can track the flows of bizarre remarks from fringe Facebook
accounts to Trump’s Twitter feed. They can challenge him in direct interviews,
a good-faith gesture destined to fail when the president operates from a place
of total conviction and muddled, self-serving reason. None of it is enough. The
lies continue, rumors metastasize, truth becomes fungible.
Just as
toppling the Facebook monopoly seems an unlikely prospect, there is no easy
escape from Trump’s Facebook brain. Each exerts an extraordinary gravitational
pull over our politics and culture. Trump has popularized a worldview in which
millions of people, like him, are able to construct their own ersatz realities,
absorbing only the information they want to be true. It is a catastrophic form
of the filter bubble that media theorists warned against a decade ago. Except
this time, people aren’t just living in their own personalized realities, being
spoon-fed algorithmically tuned news and advertisements. Now we’re all caught
in Trump’s filter bubble, one that he at once engenders and enjoys — a world
catering to his strange peccadilloes (like the supposed problem of shower water
volume or the dangers of fictitious protesters who throw canned soup).
Even if
you aren’t part of the 40 percent of the country that supports
Trump, we’re all trapped in the Facebook feed that streams forth whenever he
speaks. What he shares, we share in turn, if only to debunk the frightening
falsehoods and plead with our friends who somehow still believe.
