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Former US president Donald Trump, outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (L-R).
Credit: Reuters Photos
After the assassination attempt against United States former President Donald Trump, calmer voices on both sides of the political spectrum called for "lowering the temperature" of today's toxic political discourse.
By the time President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race eight days later, the temperature was as scorching as ever.
The internet has churned out a torrent of anger, recrimination and baseless conspiratorial theorising that has all but drowned out what proved to be short-lived appeals for civility.
The emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic front-runner touched off new paroxysms of disinformation and explicitly hateful comments.
More than 1 in 10 posts mentioning her on social platform X on Sunday included racist or sexist attacks, according to PeakMetrics, which tracks activity online.
They included false claims about her race and whether she was ineligible to run for the presidency because she was not a citizen.
(She is a citizen, and she is eligible to run.)
The internet has long rewarded vitriol over virtue, but with each passing year and each new crisis, the erosion of compassion, cordiality and common cause online has become the nature of discourse online rather than an unfortunate feature of it.
Most social media platforms profit when outrage and indignation results in more engagement, and ultimately, more advertising revenue. Companies have little incentive to alter the algorithms that allow toxic content to spread, despite calls from political leaders appealing to society's better angels.
That dynamic appears all but certain to define this year's presidential election, as it did in 2016 and 2020.
"The way disinformation works is that it plays on our emotions," said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at Bellingcat, an independent, open-source research organization. "It creates an emotional response. The stuff that lowers the temperature doesn't necessarily do that."
In fact, the accounts spreading misinformation saw followers and engagement spike dramatically on social media platforms like X, Truth Social, Rumble and Gab in the wake of the first assassination attempt in the United States in the social media era. Some accounts saw an additional bump after Biden's resignation from his campaign.
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who was until recently banned from X for abusive behavior, gained nearly 50,000 new followers a day immediately after the shooting, compared with about 1,000 in the days before. "Biden's puppet masters ran the attack on Trump and they will do it again," he wrote days after the shooting.
Libs of TikTok, a right-wing account that has more than 3 million followers on X, surged as well. So did traffic to Breitbart, a right-wing website, which blamed the assassination attempt, without evidence, on the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans disaffected with Trump's political rise.
The dynamic was most pronounced after the Trump shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. People flocked to social media almost instantly to learn what happened and, in many cases, to speculate wildly before facts had time to emerge.
Among those offering unsubstantiated conjecture was Elon Musk, the owner of X, whose website now plays host to far-right users once barred from the platform for spreading falsehoods or inciting violence.
"Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate," Musk wrote within hours of the shooting referring to the Secret Service, without evidence. The post, to date, has more than 92 million views.
Disinformation on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok appeared to be amplified by inauthentic accounts -- bots that spread specious claims with hashtags describing the assassination as staged.
Nearly half of the accounts making those claims were fake, resulting in more than 4,00,000 interactions, such as reposts or likes, with users, according to Cyabra, a social media intelligence company based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The company found the same phenomenon after Biden's withdrawal, indicating a coordinated campaign to promote Trump and denigrate Biden.
Readily available tools using artificial intelligence have also made it easier to distort reality, compounding the cacophony. Some people, for example, manipulated images of the shooting almost instantaneously to make it appear that the Secret Service agents guarding Trump were smiling afterward. This week, video deepfakes spread of Biden and Harris.
Traffic skyrocketed on most platforms as people searched for information about an unfolding news event -- in this case, an assassination attempt. It did especially well on those that featured emotionally charged but factually challenged assertions of blame even before the facts could emerge.
Rumble and Parler, two websites catering to right-wing users, experienced bumps in traffic. Trump's own social media platform, Truth Social, saw by far the biggest rise, with traffic increasing 448 per cent compared with Saturdays in June, according to Similarweb, a company that monitors web traffic.
Tellingly, the sites that saw almost no change in traffic were Facebook and Threads, both owned by Meta, which has made a conscious decision to give less emphasis to political content.
Other platforms, like X, Telegram, Gab and Rumble, have made a point of being havens for unfiltered political speech. X now shares revenue with prominent users who drive engagement with the platform, offering an incentive for sensational content.
The difference in traffic suggests that changes in algorithms, which are closely guarded secrets, can have an impact on what goes viral. The cost for lowering the political temperature, however, is less engagement and fewer visits, resulting in fewer advertising dollars.
"The internet didn't create bigotry or conspiracy theories," said Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs for the Western States Center, an advocacy organization that tracks extremist ideologies. "It's just dramatically increased the reach and speed at which they're able to spread."
After the attempted assassination, and again after Biden's withdrawal announcement, platforms faced new calls to do more to rein in violent or threatening content.
There appears to be little prospect of change, however.
After nearly a decade of concerted efforts by these companies to curb misinformation and other harmful posts that violate their own policies, most of the platforms have backed off. They have reduced the moderation of all but the most egregious posts as a priority -- and with it the costly staff required to do it.
None have announced any changes to policies since the assassination attempt. The inaction starkly contrasts with measures Facebook took after Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 election, or the moves by major platforms to close accounts of those who orchestrated the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill in 2021.
Meta, the owner of Instagram along with Facebook and Threads, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did TikTok, Truth Social and X.
The vitriol online, meantime, has once again intensified.
Some of it was fueled from the top, as Trump himself took to social media to renew his attacks on Biden and the Democratic Party. He claimed that Biden did not actually have Covid and questioned who exactly was running the country. "They stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries -- A First!" Trump wrote Monday. "These people are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!"
His supporters soon warned of an elite conspiracy to oust Biden.
"We are witnessing a Third World-style coup engineered by oligarchs as we speak, and it isn't going to be pretty," Harmeet K Dhillon, a lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee, wrote on X. "Stay calm, folks. It's about to get crazy."