BREAKING: This afternoon Donald Trump picked as his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel acolyte who has praised the FTC’s Lina Khan for her antitrust work. A nationalist with Ivy League credentials, Vance has a set of policy views that would once have been unorthodox in the national GOP but are starting to become more mainstream. Read a rundown here of what that means for the future of technology policy (for Pro subscribers), and more on the pick in tomorrow’s Digital Future Daily. America is still reeling from its first assassination attempt of the social media era, and the whirlwind on social media seems to be making the national recovery, if anything, harder. The difference between 2024 and 1981, the last time a president or former president was shot, was stark. It took an instant after a shooter apparently grazed former President Donald Trump’s ear, coming mere centimeters from likely killing him, for X, TikTok and the rest of the social media ecosystem to be flooded. Competing reports, false information, speculation, tasteless jokes and memes poured in about what could be one of the most consequential events in modern American history. For a taste of the surreal spectacle: Trolls mobbed the replies to a post Saturday morning before the shooting by John Hinckley, the most recent would-be presidential assassin, who has chosen after leaving prison to use the platform to promote his songwriting and paintings of cats. For those who wondered if anything would be meaningfully different about our online morass after a major, violent national event, the answer is clearly “no.” To compare 1981 to 2024, then, is a sharp diagnostic for how our media landscape has changed, and what it might look like in a future digital-first (or -only) media environment — especially as after some years of caution and heavy moderation, the social-media landscape seems to revert to an earlier, less-policed version of the internet. When Hinckley shot then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981, most Americans consumed their news through newspapers and nightly broadcast television — slow, ritualistic, aggressively gatekept media channels. (CNN had launched less than a year earlier; the shooting is largely credited with drawing attention and credibility to the network’s 24-hour format.) The media’s current town square — Elon Musk’s X — couldn’t be more different, a speed-driven free-for-all with its owner and his followers completely discarding the sober, wait-and-see approach of traditional newsgathering. One of his first moves as head of the company was to gut its safety and policy teams. But it’s not just a matter of internal policies: Musk has turned himself into a main character on his own platform, with little sense of restraint or responsibility to the facts. It hasn’t yet been 48 hours since the shooting and Musk is already drawing attention to conspiracies around an alleged cover-up of the shooter’s digital activity, a conspiracy with no supporting evidence except the lack of news around it yet. “Twitter remains pretty vital, and it shocks me how similar the social media reaction to this event was to everything else,” said Jeremiah Johnson, author of the Infinite Scroll Substack and founder of the Center for New Liberalism think tank. “There are people doing conspiracy theories from every direction, it's a false flag, the guy's a Democrat, he's a Republican, no, he's just pretending to be a Republican… there was even a conspiracy theory that the guy was mad about Donald Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein.” Any veteran social media user might have predicted not just the conspiracy explosion, the raft of vitriol and ersatz media criticism across the political spectrum: POLITICO’s Michael Schaffer, sifting through the first knee-jerk reactions, wrote that “the first hours after the gun went off don’t suggest that people in positions of responsibility have any sort of road map to anything other than the next all-too-familiar shock.” Overtly malign actors took advantage of the moment to sow chaos, flooding the zone with AI-generated images meant to bolster conspiracy theories about the shooting as POLITICO’s John Sakellariadis reported. Musk took the opportunity of the shooting to immediately endorse Trump for president, something he had previously heavily hinted at but declined to do explicitly. He then immediately pivoted to attacking the media for publishing cautious headlines in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, claiming that “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.” He began to attack the Secret Service mere hours after the shooting before major details were confirmed, saying Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “ought to be in jail.” The high-stakes, volatile nature of an assassination attempt was almost irresistible fodder for the churn native to social media discourse. And in fairness to Musk, that churn wasn’t characteristic only to his platform, or to the right wing: Far-left accounts rushed to lament the shooter’s failure to assassinate Trump, and Israeli tech firm Cyabra found a wave of false information and bot activity on Instagram, X and TikTok. Social media can also occasionally bring legitimately useful information to light in the rapid-fire aftermath of a breaking news event, like in the case of the BBC interview with an eyewitness whose account went viral and has been mostly validated. Domain expertise from internet users in niche communities can bring potentially relevant facts to light before the so-called “legacy media” would: Various users on X pointed out that Thomas Crooks, the alleged shooter, was wearing a t-shirt advertising the popular gun YouTuber “Demolition Ranch.” Johnson compared the situation to the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013, when a nascent social media ecosystem tracked every movement of law enforcement as they chased the fugitive bomber — and fingered a few incorrect suspects along the way. That drama was a digital-media sideshow when it played out more than a decade ago. Now, it’s part and parcel of mainstream political media and discourse. “Information moves at light speed, but sometimes it ends up being the wrong information,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to be careful about this stuff.” The speed with which Musk himself jumped on the partisan-motivated conspiracy bandwagon is in keeping with the incentives of his platform. It also may say less about Musk’s already well-known politics than the extent to which he has come to fully embody, almost literally in his ownership of X, the anything-goes ethos of the early internet. As governments across the world increasingly seek to act as moderators of online spaces, Musk’s reaction to the Trump shooting displayed his ongoing commitment to a public sphere that maintains the character of early internet forums: Loosely moderated; rife with baseless speculation and freewheeling images and video of questionable provenance; driven by a lowest-common-denominator appeal to pure shock value and reaction. When “normal” political conditions prevail, this creates the informational fog of war to which most Americans have already resigned themselves. In the face of actual political violence like this weekend’s, when calls for retribution and blame don’t feel quite as rhetorical as they might otherwise, the brave new world of algorithmic news dissemination promoted by Musk and others feels significantly more dangerous.
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