The Trolls’ Comeuppance

The easiest way to get attention online is to post the most outrageous, controversial take possible. That encourages other people to do the same, until you’re trying to outbid one another with the most extreme take. It’s called “take inflation.” Social media encourages take inflation, and take inflation morphs our politics because it can create a false sense of consensus around ideas that seem popular online but are not in real life.

A few years ago, Democrats were struggling with the effects of take inflation. Certain left-wing ideas popular online, such as decriminalizing border crossings, were fringe offline. In 2019, my now-colleague Jonathan Chait presciently argued that Joe Biden would win the Democratic primary despite his age because he was the least-online candidate and therefore unlikely to support such policies.

That was before the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter, renamed it X, and turned it into a platform that spreads racist and misogynist ideas, such as the “Great Replacement” theory and the disenfranchisement of women. This reversed the dynamic Chait identified in 2019: It is now politicians on the right who find their perceptions skewed by what draws approval on social media and their efforts to tailor their personas to appeal to that audience. If you’re looking for an explanation for why conservatives were shocked that Democrats routed Republicans in the midterms, flipping seats and states that haven’t gone blue in generations, this is a good place to start.

When Musk first took over Twitter, I worried that Americans would become trapped in an “algorithmic cage”—that right-wing ownership would allow Trump allies to control what Americans saw and heard, and as a result, shape their understanding of reality. I did not anticipate that conservatives would trap themselves in that cage.

[Adam Serwer: Elon Musk’s free-speech charade is over]

The Twitter takeover went wrong for conservatives in two ways. The first is that they posted more and more toxic content in an effort to drive engagement. The second is that they had no idea how unpopular that toxic content had become; both influencers and politicians mistook engagement for approval. Political influencers and parties’ incentives can align. In the end, however, the former is looking for engagement and the latter for votes, and those interests can diverge—leaving politicians chasing engagement while not realizing they are shedding voters.

If you were spending hours on X, you might have believed that most Americans were delighted by cruel memes celebrating deportations, or that affordability issues were a “hoax,” as President Trump kept insisting, or that a “red wave” was inevitable.

In October, the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, Bo French, said that a photo of South Asian students cheering at a football game was an example of how “Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” The post went viral, French got a lot of attention for it, and few of his colleagues spoke out to condemn it, during a campaign season in which Texas Governor Greg Abbott accused his Democratic opponent of wanting to impose “Sharia law.”

Lines such as these were popular with an audience of racist mediocrities who spent the last few days of the campaign posting memes idolizing the fictional character Anakin Skywalker, one of the main antagonists of Star Wars. One MAGA poster said Skywalker, who becomes a mass murderer after rightly being denied a promotion, was emblematic of “the white male experience.” If you say so!

In his book on the attention economy, The Siren’s Call, Chris Hayes observes that social media takes something essential to the human experience—our desire for attention and recognition—and monetizes it. As Hayes argues, one person—Donald Trump—above all others has successfully exploited the dynamic of trading persuasion for attention, and he has many imitators. The tactic often doesn’t work out for those imitators, however.

In Ohio, for example, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, got a lot of attention for an ad that accused his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about being abused as a child by her stepfather. The ad featured Acton’s mother, who had fled the state with the stepfather after he was indicted. This is the kind of attack that might have played well on X, and many Republicans, including Trump, defended it. But the allegations were backed up by contemporaneous documentation, and outside the containment zone of the online cesspool, the ad made Ramaswamy look despicable to most Ohio voters. Trollish dunking that’s celebrated on social media has a habit of spilling over into the real world, but it doesn’t always have the effect the trolls are hoping for.

“Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse,” Hayes writes. But the attention economy is not always so easily controlled. Republican candidates had reason to believe that expressing contempt for ethnic and religious minorities was politically effective enough to overcome their disadvantages in other areas. But dialing up the bigotry did not help them this time, and they lost their races—in many cases to women and candidates of color. In Texas, for example, voters rejected the entire Republican slate, turning the state blue after three decades of Republican dominance.

[Read: How Texas turned blue]

Now, for the first time in history, the Texas “big three” will all be women: The incoming Texas speaker of the House is Senfronia Thompson, the lieutenant governor–elect is Vicki Goodwin, and the governor-elect is Gina Hinojosa, with Thompson and Hinojosa the first Black and Hispanic women in their respective positions. This would have been surprising if you were spending all of your time on X and thinking that Americans were clamoring for ethnic cleansing and the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment.

I do not mean to dismiss the power inherent in controlling these platforms. Even if X’s influence on the mass public is limited, because so many mainstream institutions and figures have remained on the platform, it can skew their perceptions of what is popular, just, or wise, and by extension their decision making.

This is one reason the Trump administration is such a mess: To Trump, everyone’s job is to create content their audience will like, not to consider the wisest or best policy. This is why you have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posting workout videos while mismanaging a war and encouraging measles outbreaks. This administration is less about achieving tangible policy goals than about creating the perception that those goals have been achieved and the libs owned through content designed for the more morally depraved audiences on X, or for the validation-obsessed president himself.

Still, Musk’s capture of the social network has normalized far-right ideas, especially among status-chasing elites. For Musk, that benefit might outweigh the cost. For Republicans seeking elected office, it might not be such a boon. It definitely wasn’t last week.