Thomas Chatterton Williams writes:

To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you wage mimetic warfare with the unsubstantiated smear you’ve got, not the one you want. It just so happens that the one most recently deployed by Donald Trump is the kind that proliferates these days on X.

When Trump declared, seemingly out of nowhere, during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets of the people that live there,” he drew incomprehension, followed by widespread ridicule, from mainstream audiences. What came next was a furious and revealing national conversation on important questions of immigration, race, assimilation, work ethic, diet, traffic violations, duty (to struggling native-born constituencies and to newcomers alike), the limits of tolerance, the inevitability of its opposite, the nature of truth, and much else besides. But on the social-media platform that had provided him with the paranoid talking point in the first place, the discussion and reproduction of Trump’s outburst immediately gave way to the naked and sustained expressions of racism that have become emblematic of the website over the past two years.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference. [Continue reading…]