Communications Major

Inside the alternate reality of the president’s Twitter account, where he absorbs and amplifies a noxious stream of disinformation.

President Trump turned his morning tweetstorm about the travel ban into a Facebook video and the result was ... not good. It seems you can now create a "video" from tweets and old campaign photos. Who needs PowerPoint!?

From the Big Bird memes to the animated GIFs of the candidates to the non-stop Invisible Obama jokes, the 2012 Election as a whole has been one of the most shared and commented-on events in social media history. 

A new MIT study shows why Twitter’s fake news problem will be so hard to solve. The study analyzed millions of tweets sent between 2006 and 2017 and came to this chilling conclusion: “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” It also found that “the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

The term "troll" is now widely used to mean "a nasty person on the Internet," but it's worth keeping in mind its more specific, original meaning: someone who seeks to provoke outrage for their own amusement. This is, often as not, done through weaponizing insincerity: pretending to be something they're not, or to care about an issue in order to upset those who do. A classic example would be someone posting steak recipes on a vegan message board. His personal views on veganism are irrelevant – all that matters is his desire to upset the people on that particular forum and the pleasure he derives from it.