Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"The platforms are not worried whether the content people are seeing is accurate—once a person starts down the pro-Trump rabbit hole, that’s what he or she will be fed. No wonder so many people have come away with a delusional understanding of the Trump agenda. Capital was not “woke” before Trump, and it is not “anti-woke” now; it is capital, and its incentives are always toward profit. But authoritarianism, by nature, skews those incentives toward subservience to the state.</p><p>The Trump agenda, if successfully carried out, will lead to misery on a massive scale. It will test the bars of the algorithmic cage—will Americans judge based on their own experiences, or by what they see on their screens? As Chris Hayes writes in his new book, The Siren’s Call, “Before you can persuade, you must capture attention.” Where Trump and his allies are at fault for hardship, they will seek to persuade, using the networks of communication they have captured, that someone else is at fault, that the debacles they have concocted are not occurring or are in actuality positive events. Where they cannot do this, they will simply try to bewilder Americans by clogging these channels with toxic waste, flooding “the zone with shit,” as the Trump stalwart Steve Bannon once put it."</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/trump-administration-voter-perception/681598/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/</span><span class="invisible">2025/02/trump-administration-voter-perception/681598/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialMedia</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Propaganda" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Propaganda</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Algorithms" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Algorithms</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/MediaManipulation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MediaManipulation</span></a></p>