Analysis: Trump is banned from Facebook. Trumpism is everywhere on it
Without the oxygen provided to him by Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which de-platformed Trump days after the January 6 riot, Trump won’t be able to continue to poison the body politic with lies about the 2020 election (among other things).
This is a deep misreading of just how far Trump — or, perhaps more accurately, Trumpism — has stuck its roots into Facebook. In short: You can ban Trump. But you can’t stop the march of Trumpism.
1. Ben Shapiro
2. Ben Shapiro
3. Ben Shapiro
4. Fox News
5. ForAmerica
6. Dan Bongino
7. Sean Hannity
8. Dan Bongino
9. Fox News
10. The Rachel Maddow Show
And a look back through the last 10 days (or last 100 days) will produce results remarkably similar to Tuesday’s top 10. The sources of the most shared links — day in and day out — on Facebook tend to have a very strongly pro-Trump tinge to them.
“Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.
“The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.”
If anything, the power of those sources has increased as Trump — and his Republican accomplices in Congress — has pushed the Big Lie that the election was fraudulent and stolen from him. (There is zero objective evidence to back up that claim.)
So, yes, Trump is (still) gone from Facebook — at least for now. But the roots of Trumpism have spread far and wide on the platform and will continue to grow and metastasize, with or without the former president playing an active role on the social media platform.
