News

I think that part of the reason that Trump's met with success is that he's adapted to a social media environment.

Like, historically, messages went out through media. So you had someone who was at least reasonably educated and probably at least somewhat-informed (like, you'd have a reporter that specialized in politics or whatever) as an intermediary. So you see the material with analysis.

When you have maybe five news channels on the television and maybe a couple local newspapers as your prime source of news, the press is really important.

But that's not the environment we live in any more. Most people aren't subscribing to paid news media, and Google and some others have absorbed a fair bit of advertisement money, so ad-supported news media is harder than before.

During Trump's first term, he focused on directly communicating via social media.

He also set up his own social media network; that'll even-more isolate some consumers.

So in a lot of case, Joe Blow is placed in a position where:

• He may not be in a great position to be able to evaluate the truth of a statement. If he's not seeing or doesn't trust conflicting media, it's possible to push outright lies. Trump has said a lot of things that aren't even internally-consistent with his own statements.

• Especially for people who have particular issues that upset them, it's possible to push messages that are more-targeted than in the past. Like, let's say you care about, oh, immigration. If you read MigrantNewsVlog or something, you can only be seeing material about your pet issue. As long as you agree with Trump on that, at least in sentiment, you might be okay with it.

• He has to identify the actual important information. Currently, a lot of social media optimizes for what gets engagement. Things that make people angry get engagement. So if someone keeps putting out material that produces outrage, anger, and fear, it generates engagement:

  https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

  “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

I mean, he did this through his first term. It was not politically-fatal to him to say very controversial things.

Also, specifically on Ukraine, most Americans just don't care that much or know that much about foreign policy. It's not just Ukraine, but in general. Foreign policy rarely plays a huge role in domestic politics. If there's something that's gonna really make the public upset, it's most-likely not going to be foreign policy, but domestic policy.

Also, I'd point out that these political communication issues that are broader issues than just Trump. Like, there's nothing about this that's something that only Trump can do. There's nothing about this that only politicians can do. And there's nothing about this that only Americans can do. This is something that other places will also run into.

My guess is that there will be a bit of an arms race as communications strategies evolve to deal with our new technological environment. Some of it will be what kind of information people put out. Some of it will be tweaking the recommendations algorithm on social media that does recommendations, I think -- I don't actually think that optimizing for outrage is optimal, because if being on social media is just an unmitigated flood of unpleasant, sensationalist ragebait, users start tuning out. In the short term, it might make people use a social network more, but I suspect that it's not a good idea in the long term. I don't think that clickbait titles are the long-run optimal strategy -- like, sure, in the short term, a clickbait title will win A/B testing. But in the long run, the publication putting out the material loses credibility -- one starts to say "oh, yeah, it's those guys" when seeing an URL. Maybe something like Bluesky's approach -- which I understand uses distributed curation lists -- will become the dominant paradigm on the social, and may be more-resilient to clickbait.

But I don't think that what we see in 2025 is going to simply be "the future", because there will be continued adaptation on all sides: by people generating news, people writing material, social media networks, and consumers. When radio was new in America, FDR took advantage of it with the Fireside Chats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_chats

The fireside chats were a series of evening radio addresses given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, between 1933 and 1944. Roosevelt spoke with familiarity to millions of Americans about recovery from the Great Depression, the promulgation of the Emergency Banking Act in response to the banking crisis, the 1936 recession, New Deal initiatives, and the course of World War II. On radio, he quelled rumors, countered conservative-dominated newspapers, and explained his policies directly to the American people. His tone and demeanor communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt was regarded as an effective communicator on radio, and the fireside chats kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. Their introduction was later described as a "revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform."[1]

Roosevelt believed that his administration's success depended upon a favorable dialogue with the electorate, possible only through methods of mass communication, and that it would allow him to take the initiative. The use of radio for direct appeals was perhaps the most important of Roosevelt's innovations in political communication.[2]: 153  Roosevelt's opponents had control of most newspapers in the 1930s and press reports were under their control and involved their editorial commentary. Historian Betty Houchin Winfield says, "He and his advisers worried that newspapers' biases would affect the news columns and rightly so."[3] Historian Douglas B. Craig says that Roosevelt "offered voters a chance to receive information unadulterated by newspaper proprietors' bias" through the new medium of radio.[4]

So we've had politicians move to direct communication before, and then back-and-forth adaptation in response. I expect that we will this time as well.