The New Yorker:

Today’s social platforms can instantly convert even the most harrowing news events into misleading tidbits and gleefully empty jokes.

By Kyle Chayka

After a gunman attacked Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the first pieces of media to emerge were striking photographs of Trump, with blood trickling down his face, pumping his fist defiantly as Secret Service officers escorted him off the stage. My colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells described this scene, as captured by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press, as “the indelible image of our era of political crisis and conflict.” (Trump later gloated, “Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”) As many have noted, these pictures are the documents of the incident which are presumably destined for the history books. In the present, though, public perception is influenced just as much by how the shooting gets digested and distributed online as countless fragments of viral content. Fittingly, for an event involving a former President notorious for spreading disinformation and inanity online, the assassination attempt on Trump suggests just how rapidly today’s social platforms can distort a deadly serious news event into misleading tidbits and gleefully empty jokes.

Trump has been a creature of the Internet since before he was a Presidential contender, but prior to this weekend his peak of online infamy seemed to be behind him. He once dominated Twitter, now X, but he no longer posts there, even though Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, lifted a ban on Trump’s account; for a while, his online footprint was limited to his own relatively unpopular platform, Truth Social. Trump’s most recent talked-about moments on the wider Internet were less than heroic. There was his glowering mug shot from the Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, and pictures of him apparently dozing off in court during his hush-money trial, in New York. But those events occurred back when the 2024 Presidential election still seemed like a sleepy contest between two familiar candidates retreading a previous matchup. With the assassination attempt, Trump has become social media’s main character once more, and on the Internet, at least, the main character is always the winner.

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