80 Percent of American Politics is Just Who Runs Twitter

Politics is simple in my opinion, and for now, unchanging

Politics/Culture take…

So I’ve got this problem. I don’t know how to square my overall belief that political parties should meet the wants of a populace with my other belief that most of politics is just whoever runs Twitter/X. Politicians are advised to seem “normal” to the median voter, but the ruler of the network has so much say in what the “normal” information diet is. In theory, I trust that the public is smarter than they’re given credit for, but also in theory, I believe that whoever controls the best propaganda machine has the power to frame what matters.

I’m reminded of my conflicting beliefs when watching the fallout from Donald Trump’s congressional address on Tuesday night. Democrats handled themselves in a way that garnered some criticism. There was yelling, screaming, and a reluctance to applaud even the most sympathetic characters highlighted. Cane-wielding Democratic Rep. Al Green was removed for his disruptions. Dem members held up little circular signs with phrases like, “FALSE.” It was pretty surreal.

I’d say this isn’t a productive way for an opposition party to behave, but I also see the behavior as mostly symptomatic of the unenviable position the Democrats are in. Much as I could criticize how the Democratic Party has handled itself, I see the ineffective loudness as connected to having been shut out of the vital network. Why are Democrat senators attempting to flood Twitter with a, “That shit ain’t true” script? Because they’ve lost normal control of messaging, and are grasping for some sort of way to break through.

I doubt they will break through unless Trump crashes the economy (He might be trying!). When you don’t run Twitter, it’s a bit like being a genie locked in a lamp. Yell, shriek, beat your chest, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just noise that echos within a sealed chamber. The Democrats still retain a lot of institutional advantages, and plenty of voters. They could certainly do better by moderating on a few unpopular social positions, but the main issue, divorced from policy and personality, is they’ve lost the power to speak. Absent some big technological or social change they’re screwed, just like Republicans were screwed beforehand.

I’m still struggling to fathom why a social media app that most Americans don’t use is so uniquely influential. I know it, I’ve seen it, I feel it, but the granular dynamics are better left to a technology writer. As Ben Thompson explained in 2022:

What is valuable is that social graph: while Facebook understands who you know, Twitter, more than any other company, understands what its users are interested in. That is, in theory, much more valuable; said value is diminished by the fact that Twitter just doesn’t have that many users, relatively speaking; the users it has, though, are extremely influential, particularly given the important of Twitter in media, tech, and finance. For this group Twitter is completely irreplaceable: there is no other medium with a similar density of information or interest-driven network effects.

This, by extension, drives Twitter’s cultural impact: no, most people don’t get their news off of Twitter; the places they get their news, though, are driven by Twitter. Moreover, Twitter not only sets the agenda for media organizations, it also harmonizes coverage, thanks to a dynamic where writers, unmoored from geographic constraints or underlying business realities of their publications, end up writing for other writers on Twitter, oftentimes radicalizing each other in plain sight of their readership.

You can tell me I overrate Twitter, but here’s recent American history, summarized. After Trump won in 2016, then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, he of the #StayWoke apparel, assumed responsibility for The Conversation. That meant the people running Twitter pushed their priors, and the Great Awokening world view became more salient. Righties were banned. Lefty causes like #MeToo and #BLM gained huge traction. Maybe these social movements happen without a Twitter thumb on the scale, but the platform had discretion over what gets elevated or buried. While these systems should perhaps aspire to a form of “neutrality,” I’m not sure literal neutrality is possible when you’re constructing the architecture of how real time national conversations happen. Choices are made, benefitting or costing certain points of view.

Perhaps in reaction to the Awokening shift, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, and so the perspective of the right became more mainstream. Small sample size (with large consequences), but politics has followed the social media platform. Democrats didn’t get everything they wanted in the 2018 midterm elections, but they claimed an impressive 53.4 percent of the House votes. With Twitter largely on his side, Joe Biden won the 2020 Pandemic Election while barely campaigning. Donald Trump’s claims on Covid and election security were affixed with Twitter warning labels, sending an implicit message that he was uniquely dangerously mendacious. Perhaps you agree that he is, indeed, uniquely dangerously mendacious, but the point is that the platform was taking a side in the fight. When the New York Post reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the nation’s oldest newspaper was temporarily banned from Twitter and other social media platforms. Trump and his party were getting squeezed into the genie lamp.

These same platforms, including Twitter, then banned Donald Trump for January 6th, theoretically banishing his presence to the permanent lamplands, with “no visible downside whatsoever.” Republicans underwhelmed in the 2022 midterm, but Musk had just purchased the platform. After Musk implemented his new structure, moderated by Community Notes, Trump became more popular than ever. Musk then moved from allowing Trump back on Twitter to explicit, participatory help with the campaign. You know the rest. Donald Trump won the popular vote and Musk has assumed a large role in the current administration. Liberal journalists have tried to break Musk’s grip on power by moving to BlueSky and other platforms, with mixed results.

That’s a simple summary that leaves a lot of details out, but this is the gist. Whoever runs Twitter gets to set the norms. Legacy media still retains some influence, especially with older Americans, and these publications are still largely anti-Trump. But their impact is now muted, and Elon suppresses links to their articles. Most importantly perhaps, the anti-Trump forces have lost the Thompson-articulated ability to “harmonize.” A bunch of senators repeating the same, “That shit ain’t true,” script is a feeble attempt at harmonization for a party struggling to establish a coherent signal.

So this might be simplistic but my operating assumption is that Republicans get to run the country until and unless longstanding financial disaster cuts through the network. I see a lot of pundits from various perspectives poring over Donald Trump’s approval ratings, looking for shifts in vibe. Those numbers have slipped of late, but they’re markedly higher than around this point of Trump’s first term.

I’m not even sure these are the numbers political pundits should be looking at, though. Michael Pruser of Decision Desk regularly posts voter registration updates from various states. One might think that, with Trump and Musk’s DOGE throwing their weight around, there’s a thermostatic reaction of people racing over to the Democrats. Instead, over the last week, Pruser posted a run of sixteen consecutive states with net Republican gains. When the Democrats do get a net voter gain in an update, it’s tended to be in heavily Republican states that just did an annual voter roll cleanup (More Rs than Ds are available to be knocked off rolls).

The basic story is that, while some of Trump’s moves can worry or anger swaths of the public, people aren’t joining the Democratic Party right now. You can fault the party’s positions for this state of affairs. You can fault their gerontocratic leadership. All of it matters, just perhaps not as much as the ability to decide what the “news” is and attached capacity to align a message in response to it. Everyone has advice for the Democrats right now, much of it wise. They could do better. They could do more. But what they cannot do, at least right now, is escape the lamp on their own.