How Trumps savvy army won the internet war

[rug]

As new research reveals, right wingers understand far better than liberals how cyberspace can connect like-minded souls

Sunday 1 January 2017 03.00 EST
John Naughton
Opinion

Before we finally let go of 2016, it’s worth reflecting on what we learned from it. For me, the most striking lesson was the way it demonstrated how the internet has changed democratic politics. While there is no single, overarching explanation for Donald Trump’s election, his ascendancy would have been unthinkable in a pre-internet age, for two reasons.

The first is that much of Trump’s campaign rhetoric would never have got past the editorial “gatekeepers” of an earlier era – the TV network owners and controllers, the editors of powerful print media and the Federal Communications Commission with its “fairness doctrine” (which required holders of broadcast licences to “present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, honest, equitable and balanced”).

The second reason is that in the pre-internet era, the multitudes of Trump’s vigorous, engaged and angry supporters would have had little option but to fume impotently in whatever local arenas they inhabited. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to hook up with millions of like-minded souls to crowdsource their indignation and their enthusiasm for the candidate.

So I think we can say that while the net may not have been a sufficient condition for Trump’s victory, it was definitely a necessary one. Most commentators, hypnotised by Trump’s mastery of Twitter and the prevalence of “fake news” on Facebook, attributed this entirely to social media. But again, this was an overly simplistic view, for it turns out that there was a deep structure underpinning most of what went on in social media and it needed some fairly intensive network analysis to reveal it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/01/donald-trump-savvy-army-won-internet-war