How Big Tech Brought Us Donald Trump
He wasn’t the glitch. He was the update. The algorithm put him in the White House. Twice.
The internet didn’t just break America. It rewired it.
Donald Trump isn’t a product of social media… Big Tech built the ecosystem that made this political age inevitable. These machines reward outrage, monetize extremes and conflate attention for truth. That produced a political actor who thrives on chaos.
The algorithms don’t care what you believe, only how strongly you believe it… and how loudly you scream it. Anger travels faster than empathy or logic.
Every quote-tweet, dunk, and squabble in the comments sends the same signal to the system: FEED ME MORE OF THIS.
The outrage online feels personal… but it’s just product testing. The result is a society addicted to noise… its own noise. News follows the feed. Politics follows the algorithm.
Trump came down that escalator and, on an animal level, understood these platforms better than the people who built them.
He spoke the native tongue: short, viral, emotional — unpredictable and predictable all at once.
The news didn’t cover him. It orbited him. The more chaos he created, the more reach he got. He became a living algorithm, self-learning in real time how to keep people hooked.
Politicians learned from him. Although less effective, campaigns now speak the exhausting dialect Trump perfected: outrage as identity, conflict as fundraising.
But there are signs of evolution. Mayor Pete’s very real chat with Andrew Callaghan on Channel 5. Gavin Newsom’s (often misunderstood) satire of Trump’s Twitter slop. And the low key power of Jubilee, proving that authenticity still wins on YouTube.
The next wave of politicians shouldn’t chase cable hits. They should build communities online.
The frontier isn’t X or Instagram anymore: it’s newsletters, Discord servers, subreddits, text groups. Places where connection feels small and real again.
If the next movement grows from those spaces, maybe the temperature finally drops.
That’s why we should pay attention to how Big Tech keeps reshaping the way we talk, argue and believe. They brought us Trump.
What comes next depends on us.
Really well written and a much needed perspective from a social media expert. Thank you Kevin. You’re going on my substack list immediately after HCR!
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