Comment on Is there as much enthusiasm for Trump online today as eight years ago?
foggy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I dont know I think the crowds have been mostly siloed away from each other.
Try going on truth social, if you dare.
But who knows how much of that is bot traffic and LLMs.
🤷♂️
cabbage@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I can't even enter Truth Social from Europe. I see Wikipedia estimates 600 000 monthly active users, which is of course a lot. But I struggle to wrap my head around how important it can be. Isn't it potentially a bit self defeating for them to close themselves off in a closed forum?
The Trump subreddit in 2016 seemed to have a cultural impact. Truth Social seems to be more of a footnote?
In a way Twitter is bad enough, but my impression there before deleting my account was that most of the Trump spam was Musk posts that appeared on my profile for no good reason.
donuts@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not when that closed forum acts like a circlejerking echo chamber where their cult leader can spew whatever he wants without consequences.
SolOrion@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
cabbage@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I find this to be incredibly interesting. It's like 2016 saw online polarization, but it happened on the same platforms. Today, there's a polarizations of platforms - we exist in different realities online.
I wonder if this split would have happened anyway, or if it was motivated by American politics. And I wonder what the consequences are.
It seems like a pretty fundamental development in how our information channels work, and I haven't seen it been discussed much by commentators.
Maybe my question cannot be answered because 'online' today just means something completely different than it did in 2016.