Trump Twitter thumb has a final ask from America: Virality

US president Donald Trump has one final ask from America. Imagine that America’s catastrophic coronavirus response isn’t real, imagine that masks don’t work and let’s all see how that balloon flies on the world’s digital persuasion machines. “Its just a retweet”, in the language of Trump, is built around the idea of population scale behaviour change at low cost. People can figure on the go where they stand on conspiracy theories just because something has been flung out there. That free speech excuse has long been central to the Trumpian re-election run. If we go beyond the rudimentary fact checks and try connecting the dots between America’s virus caseload, Trump’s claims and the tightening poll numbers, the rough edges of a shape begin to form. It suggests that Trump’s final ask from Americans is a request for virality on Big Tech platforms, nothing less.

None of this is novel, it’s the same old playlist from Trump’s greatest hits of 2016, but it merits mention for three reasons: The timing, the sameness and the likely political effects, which we’ll know sometime after November 3. Four years ago, Cambridge Analytica weaponised behavioural targeting and upended the election. That firm is defunct now but the tools of behavioral targeting are alive and well, and available for anyone to wield. The more fantastic the claim, the better it travels online, the results of a decade long study, published in ‘Science’, have shown.

Trump’s campaign has seized on a dubiously sourced tabloid story offering strange twists to a familiar attack plan: Joe Biden’s relationship with Ukraine. When Twitter banned, and then allowed, links to this article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, its stated intention of plugging harmful content was turned on its head. The platform managed to succeed in doing the exact opposite thing, triggering the so-called Streisand Effect, which turns a sketchy piece of content into a blockbuster. Shares of the Post article “nearly doubled” after Twitter started suppressing it, according to a despatch from MIT Tech Review.

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