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.
If you really want to know, I have maintained a presence on both left and right wing sites since the schism ~2016, as a life long liberal who felt they could no longer support the insanity over the past decade, but is still apprehensive of hardcore conservatism.
To be blunt, the energy among the right is extremely high right now. The Puff Daddy case has them celebrating like crazy, because despite what people here like to say about them, ending the institutionalized sex trafficking is actually the most important issue for many of them. Along with that, they’re extremely happy that the democrats have such a weak candidate, as they see this election to be the largest potential obstacle to actually being capable of addressing said institutionalized sex trafficking. They are also quite hopeful that a Trump victory will provide the tools necessary to deal with administrative bloat within the government, specifically addressing the FIAT currency system which makes everyone poorer year after year, which has been another significant sticking point for them. There is also, apparently, a fair bit of action being taken to combat fraud as it happens in this election, which has everyone in high spirits.
There are points of political thought that don’t lie on the conservative <-> liberal line. Which is a shockingly short line to begin with, once you see it from the outside.
The parts that concern me the most are areas where the political parties tend to walk in lock step, such as mass surveillance and monetary policy. The fact that Trump has had a rocky relationship with the GoP ever since he announced his candidacy for the 2016 election helps his image with others who are concerned about the “uniparty”.
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.
The internet and social media has made it much easier for everyone to wall themselves off into groups containing people with only their viewpoint.
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.
I don’t think that’s the question I try to ask, though I probably struggle to formulate myself well. It’s not really about comparing to Harris.
It seemed that Trump engaged a lot of people who would not usually bother with politics in 2016. He ran a campaign that completely dominated the Internet. People seemed to have nothing better to do than to create right wing memes in half serious, half joking support of him.
I don’t see that any more. What I see is a more normal campaign ran by a guy frequently making fascist talking points. He could still win, and maybe it’s still a successful campaign, but it feels very different to me from the 2016 one.
But then again, I have changed my Internet habits so that I wouldn’t see it anyway. Maybe there’s still hordes of 20-something incels posting frog memes for the masses to be offended by, it’s just off my radar.
