Trump still caters to QAnon, other extremes
In September, former President Donald Trump went on Truth Social, his social network, and shared an image of himself wearing a lapel pin in the form of the letter Q, along with a phrase closely associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement: “The storm is coming.”
In doing so, Trump ensured that the message — first posted by a QAnonaligned account — would be hugely amplified, visible to his more than 4 million followers. He also was delivering what amounted to an unmistakable endorsement of the movement, which falsely and violently claims that leading Democrats are babyeating devil worshippers.
Even as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced this past week that Trump would be reinstated — a move that followed the lifting of his ban from Twitter, though he has not yet returned — there is no sign that he has curtailed his behavior or stopped spreading the kinds of messages that got him exiled in the first place.
In fact, two years after he was banished from most mainstream social media sites for his role in inciting the Capitol riot, his online presence has grown only more extreme — even if it is far less visible to most Americans, who never use the relatively obscure platforms where he has been posting at a sometimes astonishing clip.
Since introducing his social media website in February 2022, Trump has shared hundreds of posts from accounts promoting QAnon ideas. He has continued to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen and that he is a victim of corrupt federal law enforcement agencies. And he has made personal attacks against his many perceived enemies, including private citizens whose names he has elevated.
Now Trump's increasingly probable return to major platforms raises the prospect that he will carry over his more radicalized behavior to a far wider audience on Facebook and Instagram, with a combined 5 billion active users, and Twitter, with 360 million active users.
The potential for such an outcome has alarmed extremism experts; pushed the platforms to explain that they have installed “guardrails” to deter incendiary posts; and prompted questions about how Trump's assertions, long siloed in a right-wing arena, are likely to play with mainstream voters, particularly as a sizable share of his party signals that it is ready to move on.
“It's not that Trump has meaningfully changed the way he behaves online. In fact, he's grown more extreme,” said Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who studies technology and extremism in the United States. “I don't think anybody should reasonably expect him to be any different if he's back on Facebook and Twitter. And when it comes to spreading conspiracy theories, Trump is the big tuna.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said Thursday that “Truth Social has been a success because President Trump has created a true freespeech platform, unlike the Big Tech oligarchs who censor conservatives.” He added, “President Trump should have never been banned on these social media platforms, and everybody knows their decisions were unjust and ultimately destroyed the integrity of our democracy.”
In a letter sent this month to three top Meta officials, including Mark Zuckerberg, the company's CEO, a lawyer for Trump argued that the ban had “dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse.”
The petition for reinstatement was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the decision to bar him from Facebook and Instagram, made one day after the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. At the time, the company said his presence on its sites posed a risk to public safety.
Democrats have said he's still dangerous. Last month, four of the party's members of Congress urged Meta not to reinstate Trump, writing in a letter that he was still “undermining our democracy.”
But on Wednesday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president for global affairs, wrote in a blog post that “our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded.” He added that the suspension was “an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances” and that normally, “the public should be able to hear from a former president of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms.”