The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Stephen Harrington, who begins by highlighting the importance of the attention economy in political communication; Donald Trump, for instance, is now also the Troll-in-Chief because he knows that even his most outlandish posts generate wall-to-wall media coverage.
But Trump himself can also be trolled, for instance by California governor Gavin Newsom, who has a dedicated communications team on Xitter, @GovPressOffice, that fights Trump’s fire with his own fire. This project scraped all of that account’s tweets, and categorised these as self-promotional business as usual; satirising Trump (e.g. using all-caps tweets, Trump’s catch-phrase ‘thank you for your attention to this matter’, and low-quality AI slop); trolling Trump (e.g. using AI images of Trump, and emphasising his connections to Jeffrey Epstein); and liberal shitposting (using low-effort memes and negative commentary).
These posts were rare and intermittent in the first few years of the account, but ramped up exponentially especially after the first ICE raids targeting Los Angeles; this has generated substantial engagement, especially through its trolling content. But it has mostly generated likes rather than replies, which is not usually the aim of trolling. It is possible that the account simply preaches to the converted, then, but in the process potentially also creates more noise for Trump’s posts to break through.
This work has also generated substantial news coverage. In effect, it refuses to cede online ground to right-wing trolls, and as a satirical honeypot for right-wing critiques of such trolling also enables supporters to point out the double standards of such critiques, which never hold Trump to the same standards.
