I remember when Trump first won, the American-centered part of the web I would occasionally stop by seemed completely infiltrated with MAGA trolls. You had this feeling people thought it was edgy and fun - the worst kind of cultural moment seemed to be happening.
This time around I’m not so much on mainstream social media. And when I do check them out, it seems hard to understand what the vibe is as most content is AI or from professional content creators.
The closest thing I see to Trump supporters these days seems to be the enablers who endlessly repeat how they won’t vote for Harris for some dumb reason or another - they simply cannot vote for a black woman president because it’s not progressive enough, and all that jazz. But I don’t ever see Trump supporters.
Of course they exist still. I have just chose social media platforms strategically to avoid toxic people.
So I’m wondering if the same enthusiasm for Trump that seemed to be boiling online in 2016 is still there today, and if this election only feels different because I’m self-selected into saner platforms. Or if it is really different this time around.
I get that it’s an incredibly difficult question to answer, but I would love perspectives from people who have kept up an active use of mainstream social media, or otherwise have some insights I lack.
I am not taking sides with this comment, but you could literally swap names of everything you just posted with (the opposite candidate) and there is someone saying this exact same thing somewhere on the internet. They are most likely sitting there posting about where all the Harris people went and how they moved to a saner platform to avoid toxic people… Everyone needs to remember that there is someone out there with a polar opposite viewpoint as you and it’s just as strong as yours. The internet and social media has made it much easier for everyone to wall themselves off into groups containing people with only their viewpoint. And now all of that has been fed to LLMs. This is going to be an interesting future we are walking into.
It’s not people who share your viewpoints, unless you buy into the artificial left/right dichotomy and are willing to simply accept whatever popular talking points permeate your silo. Conversely, if you wanted to share a space online with only people who are actually from your own country, or even just western society broadly, such a thing doesn’t exist at all. While the issues of political division within America are significant, what flies completely under the radar is how trivial it is for bad actors from places like Russia and China to participate freely in political debates, often without anyone actually being aware of it.