In this day and age, social media is nearly inescapable. It can be used to reach people who we normally would never imagine being able to speak with and gives people a platform to voice all their thoughts and opinions, even the bad ones. Not only have social media platforms become an integral part of many people’s lives, but they’ve evolved on their own. On any one app you can now play games with friends, make purchases, read the news and even post livestreams in real time.
In recent years, social media has even gained a hand in politics. Whether it be a place for people to spread news about injustices that may not be publicized in an everyday newspaper or giving politicians a place to voice their standings on current issues facing their constituents, social media has become an important part of the political machine.
Truly, you cannot think of former president Donald Trump without also thinking of social media. After four years of spouting seemingly all of the thoughts that crossed his mind directly onto his many social media platforms, but most notably his Twitter account, he lost that opportunity. On Jan. 8, nearly all notable social media platforms banned Donald Trump’s personal accounts, effectively eliminating his online presence.
Donald Trump, even as we’ve known him politically, has always been somewhat of a media personality. Many of his early supporters knew him from his TV show, “The Apprentice.” His presence in the media, separated from politics, is what many of his followers admired about him. In 2016, it was a mix of his Facebook ads and outrageous tweets that arguably won him the election. In the last few months before the election, his opponent’s campaign spent more than $200 million on television ads. Trump’s campaign, however, was focused on social media. Thousands of ads were run across Facebook’s platform daily, catered specifically to what the campaign deemed each viewer would like to see.
Andrew Bosworth, an executive at Facebook, was quoted by The New York Times saying that Trump did not win the election thanks to misinformation on the site, but because “he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”
While Trump’s online ad campaign may have been impressive, Facebook wasn’t the only online platform he excelled in. Twitter was also a large contributor to his success in 2016. By 2018, two years after deep diving through their website’s data, Twitter announced that they had located at least 50,258 fake accounts, otherwise known as bots, that were sharing election info in favor of Donald Trump. All of these bots originated from Russia. Not only did he have the aid of these bots, but Twitter was a place that allowed him to interact with his many followers. It wasn’t uncommon for some of his followers to have something along the lines of, “Proudly retweeted by President Donald Trump” in their Twitter bios.
While his various political social media campaigns might have been impressive, it was often hard to go more than a few days without one of his many infamous tweets being questioned by the public. Donald Trump’s eventual ban from social media wasn’t anybody’s fault but his own.
As his supporters often said, he was honest. He voiced seemingly all of his opinions online. The things he spoke about ranged from tiny, meaningless rants to actual world problems. More often than not, his tweets stirred up controversy. He wasn’t above tweeting personal verbal attacks to anyone who dared disagree with him. He wasn’t above tweeting or retweeting sexist, homophobic and downright racist content. According to The New York Times, in only his third year of presidency, he had made over 11,000 tweets. In 2017, he tweeted an average of nine times a day, and that amount tripled by 2019. In the same set of statistics, The New York Times found that more than half of his tweets consisted of some sort of attack against someone or something.
His tweets, while attracting some, were isolating to many. It was this isolation that really cost him the election. While many voters weren’t necessarily for Joe Biden, many were against Trump. After nearly a month of arguing between parties, the votes were certified and Joe Biden was announced the winner of the 2020 presidential election with 51.38% of the votes.
This was the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s social media accounts. It was after he lost that he began incessantly tweeting about a stolen, rigged or fraudulent election.
On Jan. 6, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters waged an attack on the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to attempt a coup to delay the certification of the electoral college votes. For once in his presidential campaign, Trump’s Twitter remained silent for hours.
On Jan. 7, Twitter announced that they had placed a 12-hour ban on Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account as he had violated their terms of service by inciting violence. They announced that any further tweets made by the president that violated their terms of service would result in a permanent ban.
On Jan. 8, Twitter announced that Donald Trump had in fact attempted to send a tweet that violated Twitter’s terms of service and would be permanently banned from the platform. This started a domino effect of different social media platforms banning the president; Twitter was followed by Facebook, then Google, then Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord… the list goes on and on, to almost every platform you can think of.
In the end, it was social media’s presence in Donald Trump’s campaign that led to his rise and fall. While other politicians may have thought or even said equally controversial, offensive and isolating statements, Trump sent all of those sentiments out to stay on the internet forever for everyone to see. For Donald Trump, social media was a double edged sword: it helped him win an election and it made him lose one.
