In President Donald Trump’s second term, everything is content. Videos of immigration raids are shared widely on X by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), conspiracy theories dictate policy, and prominent right-wing podcasters and influencers have occupied high-level government roles. The second Trump administration is, to put it bluntly, very online.
Trump and his supporters have long trafficked in—and benefited from—misinformation and conspiracy theories, leveraging them to build visibility on social media platforms and set the tone of national conversations. During his first term, Trump was famous for announcing the administration’s positions and priorities via tweet. In the years since, social media platforms have become friendlier environments for conspiracy theories and those who promote them, helping them spread more widely. Trump’s playbook has adjusted accordingly.
Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, says that social media, particularly right-wing social media ecosystems, are no longer just a way for Trump to control conversations and public perception. The administration, he says, is now actively making decisions and shaping policy based primarily on how they’ll be perceived online. Their priority is what right-wing communities care about—regardless of whether it’s real.
WIRED spoke to Moynihan, who argues that the US has entered a new level of enmeshment between the internet and politics, in what he calls a “clicktatorship.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: To start us off, what is the “clicktatorship”?
Don Moynihan: A “clicktatorship” is a form of government that combines a social media worldview alongside authoritarian tendencies. This implies that people working in this form of government are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication, but that their beliefs, judgement, and decisionmaking reflect, are influenced by, and are directly responsive to the online world to an extreme degree. The “clicktatorship” views everything as content, including basic policy decisions and implementation practices.
The supply of a platform that encourages right-wing conspiracies and the demand of an administration for people who can traffic in those conspiracies is what’s giving us the current moments of “clicktatorship” that we’re experiencing.
The “clicktatorship” is generating these images to justify the occupation of American cities by military forces, or to justify cutting off resources to states that did not support the president, to do things that would have truly shocked us a decade ago.
Trump’s first presidency was characterized by a sort of showmanship. How is that different from what we’re seeing now?
The first Trump presidency might be understood as a “TV presidency,” where watching The Apprentice or Fox News gave you real insight into the milieu in which Trump was operating. The second Trump presidency is the “Truth Social or X presidency,” where it is very hard to interpret without the reference points of those online platforms. Some of the content and messaging that the president or other senior policymakers use is stuffed with inside references, messaging that doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re already in that online community.
Modes of discourse have also changed. We’re seeing very senior policymakers exhibit the patterns and habits that work online. Pam Bondi going to a Senate hearing with a list of zingers and printed out X posts as a means of responding to a traditional accountability process, reflects how this online mode of discourse is shaping how public officials view their real life roles.
There’s been a lot of research about the polarizing and harmful nature of social media. What does it mean that our political leaders are people who have not only been successful in manipulating social media, but have themselves been manipulated by it?
Social media is cooking the brains of people who spend a lot of time on it, including policymakers and elected officials. Traditionally, we thought about politicians as communicators, and that’s shaped how we think about their use of social media, that it’s a way of getting information out there. For a long time, most of us thought about Trump in that way, as someone who was very skillful at communicating and manipulating social media to draw support. As a candidate, he rolled into Republican awareness because of his willingness to trade in conspiracy theories, starting with President Obama’s birthplace, for example.
But Trump and a lot of people who work for him are also people who are consumers of social media and consumers of some pretty dark corners of the online world. They’re not just manipulating the message, they’re also being manipulated by the world that they inhabit.
They are addicted to, and affected by, the social media environment they occupy. That feels like a different way of thinking about social media than we’ve thought about before.
Even platform content moderators have said that they ended up believing in conspiracy theories from watching the content they’re meant to police. For people like Trump and Elon Musk, who have shown themselves to be adept at weaponizing false information, where’s the line between being strategic and getting high on your own supply?
The people at the top of that food chain are not immune from the effects of the type of content they’re promoting. Elon Musk is a good example here. Probably the most consequential thing that took place during the first year of the Trump administration was the elimination of USAID. This was done mostly, it seemed, because there was some ideological opposition to USAID within the administration. But also because Musk seemed to genuinely believe these conspiracy theories that were founded on nothing. This was probably the first federal agency that was killed by online conspiracy theories and the cost in human life is potentially going to be in the millions as a result.
These leaders are not just consuming content and conspiracies, they’re creating their own content to feed this online community. Can you talk about that?
To actively engage in that world, they are thinking about their decisions as potential content that will fit into an online environment. So I think it’s affecting both the judgment and decision-making of the people who are running our government.
When Trump [was talking about deploying the National Guard] to Portland, Oregon, if you were looking at online content about Portland and the conflict between protesters and ICE there, you would imagine that the city was torn apart. In reality, everyday life in Portland is completely normal, and there is one federal building that’s the site of friction where protesters are constantly protesting.
But the president is looking for images that will justify him extending and abusing authority in these places. He understands that imagery is part of that justification. The more content he can produce that suggests a breakdown of order, the greater the permission he will have to do more extreme things.
Social media used to bill itself as a democratizing force. What does that look like now?
We used to talk about the “platform to policymaking pipeline” in much more measured terms. There’s a bunch of my research that got in front of government officials because I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. That felt like a reasonably democratic process by which people who might not be in DC could, if their ideas were compelling enough, reach out and engage. But the dynamics of the platform to policy pipeline are determined by the people who control the platform.
The way Musk has restructured Twitter is to encourage more conspiratorial content, to encourage people who are basically professional posters by rewarding them and promoting them over people who actually know what they’re talking about. Then the Trump administration is looking for those people and wants to put them into positions of power, or is listening to them and their ideas. I think very online people who are also policymakers tend to respond to very online voices.
How should we think of the role of platforms, specifically X, in all this?
I think if you simply describe the relationship between X, Musk, and the Trump administration in purely factual terms, it’s very hard not to conclude that there is a relationship where, to some degree, X serves as an extension of the state, but also the state serves as an extension of Musk’s interests. The richest man in the world, the president’s largest donor, turned an influential platform into a space that supported Trump’s agendas, then was invited to make radical changes to American government, and while benefitting mightily from American government contracts. They are legally independent, but there’s such a practical interdependence in how they were working in Trump’s second term that you can’t really think about the influence and power of one without referencing the other.
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