Angry Young Men for Trump
Liz Mermin
On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All the influencers back him, and he’s all over social media’ (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). ‘Harris is all over social media too,’ I said. ‘Not the same,’ he said. He was right. I should have known better.
I spent most of 2023 uncomfortably immersed in dark, angry corners of the internet for a documentary feature (Doom Scroll) on the infamous misogynist and long-time Trump fan Andrew Tate. Our working assumption was that the design of social media platforms, the way their algorithms are tuned, made the success of someone like Tate inevitable. Tate himself was just the loudest, most dogged or luckiest of the thousands of grifters striving to be the world’s most influential influencer by taking on the ‘woke mob’ with a professed return to ‘traditional values’.
Many people refused to talk with us. They said that by giving Tate more attention we were serving his ends. The idea that a television documentary would have any influence at all on Tate’s enormous popularity is, unfortunately, laughable; the idea that ignoring him will make the problem go away is wishful thinking. What we hoped the film might do was help viewers understand that social media companies churn out addictive, unhealthy products – like junk food or tobacco – with no concern for the effects they have on consumers.
The violence of Tate’s misogyny led to a ban by all the major platforms in August 2022, but his content spread even further: at his prompting, an army of followers clipped and posted his videos so that they continued to dominate the feeds of boys and young men on TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. The platforms made periodic and ineffective attempts to clear him off (except Elon Musk, who welcomed him back to Twitter, where he went from zero to one million followers in 24 hours). They could have done more, but why would they? Tate served their bottom line.
The popularity and success of such a ridiculous and disgusting character prompted some useful self-reflection: in this case, urgently needed discussions about some of the challenges facing boys and young men. But calls for healthier male role models and images of positive masculinity ignored the way that social media algorithms work: positive messages simply can’t compete with negative ones. Tribalism, conflict and extremism provoke responses and are therefore rewarded by the algorithms. Moderation, compromise and nuance suppress engagement and are demoted. Michelle Obama’s mantra ‘when they go low, we go high’ is a losing strategy on social media.
The platforms’ algorithms are content agnostic: their goal is to keep hold of your eyeballs for as long as possible so they can collect your data and sell you ads. If we lived in a world where more of us engaged with Fellini than serial-killer docuseries, the wealth of material freely available online might lead to a new enlightenment. But anger, resentment and fear are what keep us engaged the longest. This is win-win for someone like Tate: those who love him engage because his content is angry with others (feminists, liberals) and those who hate him engage because they want to prove him wrong. Tate taught students at his online ‘university’ the adage that it doesn’t matter if they hate you or love you, so long as they’re talking about you. He figured 60 per cent negative to 40 per cent positive reactions was the sweet-spot.
One of the most striking post-election statistics was the rise in support for Trump among the young. Many of us were shocked, though we shouldn’t have been. Trump’s content was being pumped at young men at a greater rate even than Tate’s. He did the rounds of manosphere podcasts, where he made tasteless jokes that landed well with the people who also laughed at the offensive remarks made about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally at the end of October. There really is no such thing as bad publicity on social media. So why was the election result a surprise?
Comments
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20 November 2024
at
6:58pm
Brian Milton
says:
If it’s that simple, then force the platforms to change their algorithms?
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21 November 2024
at
4:00am
Brian Fitton
says:
@
Brian Milton
That’s an excellent idea. But given that governments (in particular, their wallets) are more or less in thrall to those platforms, any meaningful change is extremely unlikely.
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22 November 2024
at
7:58am
avogadro2
says:
@
Brian Fitton
….which is why we cannot blithely quote Michelle Obama ’going high’, when alas the truth is that both Dems and Reps go as low as they dare when it comes to fundraising. Also Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, LFI, Les Republicains, etc etc. when your Prime Minister has to have his trousers paid for by a secretive donor, you know that politics is in a fairly negative place.
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20 November 2024
at
7:10pm
margot sheehan-burns
says:
I see very few ads on the social-media platforms I use. That may be the theoretical revenue model, but the advertisements aren't there much.
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21 November 2024
at
4:02am
Brian Fitton
says:
@
margot sheehan-burns
It might be that they’re not there much for you in particular. One of the ways Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. are able to amass so much wealth is through “targeted advertising”. There was an interesting essay about it in the LRB this year, although I forget when exactly.
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20 November 2024
at
7:41pm
Michael Halmshaw
says:
'Moderation, compromise and nuance suppress engagement and are demoted.'
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21 November 2024
at
3:42am
Nancy Mullane
says:
When I realized in 2019 all of my social media viewing/liking/disliking and that of my linked “friends” was captured and sold to sell me things I didn’t want and messaging that contradicted all I knew to be factually true, I stopped social media-ing. Where did I ever find the time? But the hollow “anger and resentment and fear” fed to men, young and old on social media, is very dark, especially to women, young and old, walking alone. We are not going back so we all, must fiercely, protect on another.
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24 November 2024
at
5:53am
su fernandez
says:
With all due respect, are you serious: "If we lived in a world where more of us engaged with Fellini than serial-killer docuseries, the wealth of material freely available online might lead to a new enlightenment."
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30 November 2024
at
12:03pm
Rory Allen
says:
Recently I came across a book probably known to many LRB readers, but not previously to me: 'The Treason of the Intellectuals', by Julien Benda. It was written just as Fascism was getting into its stride, and gives what to me seems a persuasive analysis of the emotional foundation of Fascism then, and whatever movement unites Trump, Putin, Modi and the rest, now. It suddenly seems astonishingly relevant, 97 years after its original publication.
Read moreIf you live in that part of social media, yes. It's easy to find and curate influencers, vloggers, etc, creating carefully made, thoughtful content, many of whom have thousands of followers. Tate's message is inherently antagonistic; there is infinite space for messages that are not.