Molly Roberts: Social media shaped the narrative
Of all the defining events of the digital era — the 2016 election, the pandemic, the Jan. 6 insurrection, the mass shootings — Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump most clearly reveals the way social media has changed our world. Or, make that messily.
When news broke of shots fired at the rally, it was necessary to figure out what happened. Back in the day, that would have been the job of journalists (and official investigators). Sunday, it was the job of every individual with an internet connection to log on and guzzle a confusing concoction of truths, half-truths and lies — and then to regurgitate it.
It was a plot by the “deep state” to eliminate the swamp-drainer in chief, right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed. Or a hit ordered by President Biden himself? No, insisted far-left misinformation mongers, it was a “false flag” operation by the target’s own team. Less addled observers leaped to less wild, but unconfirmed, conclusions: The perpetrator must have been an ideological opponent of the man he tried to kill, with an agenda to advance the Democratic Party.
We have seen all of this before — the scramble to find facts that can’t immediately be found at a time when Americans live in two divergent realities. We’ve also already seen social media sites try, and fail, to separate fact from fiction. What’s most fascinating about this episode, however, isn’t just the collective effort to establish what happened. It’s the matching attempt to determine what it meant — in real time.
Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) was among the first to give the GOP its cue. By calling Trump an “authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the Biden campaign was responsible for what happened Saturday evening, Vance suggested. Others, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) to the Kremlin, mirrored his line. Progressive rhetoric, apparently, created the atmosphere that prompted the attack.
Progressives, meanwhile, mostly fretted. Was it indecorous to mention how Trump had himself encouraged political violence when he’d just become its subject? Was it possible to condemn what had happened forcefully enough without implicitly accepting some of the blame? “Ballots, not bullets,” the verging-on-viral refrain had begun.
In any crisis, these calculations happen. But they used to happen more slowly, behind the scenes, in private consultation. Now, they take place in the all-too-public push and pull of platform upon platform, with every speaker knowing that everyone else is watching. We — elected leaders, commentators, everyday people from one tribe or another — are scared about diverging from the consensus on what’s appropriate to say and by whom. Staying quiet until more is known doesn’t feel like an option because someone might interpret silence as a statement in itself — and because social media cultivates an ever-present fear of missing out.
As we read, post and repost, we’re both shaping the narrative and being shaped by it. All the while, we still don’t know whether the same forces twisting the conversation now also shaped the perpetrator, who, at 20 years old, came of age not only in the Trump era but also in the internet era.
What no one wants to do, and what the dynamics of always-on, always-moving social media won’t let us do, is wait.
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