Almost a month into his Presidency….
Joe Biden goes about his way putting the American Government back tighter and getting Good polling numbers for his efforts…..
But in the media?
The word ‘Trump’ still predominates…
The media and social media just can’t get off the drug….
What this says about the public is also instructive….
Why it matters: Donald Trump used social media to provoke and distract Americans around the clock, rewiring the country’s nervous system and diminishing the value of each individual news cycle. Now we’re going to learn whether our fried collective circuits can recover.
By the numbers: Over the first two weeks of February, there were an estimated 13.8 million social media posts about President Biden, according to data from Keyhole.
- That’s roughly an eighth of the 104 million posts about Trump over the first two weeks of January.
The big picture: Actors on the national stage are choosing from two different approaches in this new world.
Some are using time-tested, Trump-like tactics to fill the post-Trump void.
- Trump-supporting officeholders — among them Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — have commandeered news cycles by promoting unsupported claims of election fraud or amping up rhetoric against “socialist” Democrats.
- Elon Musk’s social-media antics — pumping up cryptocurrencies, inviting Vladimir Putin for a chat on Clubhouse, sitting for three-hour podcast interviews — show the same game can be played in business and tech.
- They’re betting that, even with Trump off stage, the information-overload dynamics he exploited will continue to shape U.S. society.
Others are aiming to reset public-square norms, believing that a pandemic-exhausted public yearns for simpler, straighter talk at lower volume.
- Most prominent in this camp is the incoming Biden administration, whose approach to shaping the public conversation couldn’t be more different from Trump’s impulsive show….
image….abcnews.go.com