Weekly Scroll: Coconut Memes
Kamala memes, assassination reactions, Disney failures, and an unburdened squirrel
Welcome to all the new subscribers who arrived over the last week! This is a blog about internet nonsense - because the social media environment we all live in is ridiculous, but it’s also worth analyzing seriously. Occasionally, against my better judgment, I dabble in politics.
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This week we’re taking a look at how social media reacted to the assassination attempt on Trump, how Kamala’s meme game might help her become President, how Disney is losing a generation of kids to YouTube, and much more.
“You won’t find better analysis of the social internet than Infinite Scroll”
-Barack Obama, possibly
About that Assassination
I have to apologize for writing something incredibly sincere and earnest about politics earlier this week. Won’t happen again.
Now, let’s talk about how social media reacted to the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I was quoted in Politico talking about the overall reaction, and the more I look at the last week the more it feels like this was just the same as any other event.
It’s bizarre, but genuinely there was nothing special about how the internet reacted to Donald Trump almost getting killed. A former president and front-runner to be the next president came within an inch of having his brains splattered all over a smiling crowd of MAGA fans, and the internet just did the same stuff it always does. Maybe at a louder volume, but literally nothing about this was different from any other news event.
First, people started playing detective. Within minutes there were people analyzing what had happened, and reporters on scene interviewing people who had actually seen the shooter. The internet is actually very, very good at playing detective in certain scenarios, and this was one of them.1 But also! As soon as people started getting scraps of information, the conspiracy theories started. The left thought it was a false flag. The right thought it was the left. The deranged assumed it must be related to Jeffrey Epstein. Everyone started accusing each other from all directions.
It turned into a tribal game where you find the right details so that you can spin the narrative and score points on the other side. The guy had donated to Act Blue! But he was a registered Republican! But what if that was a fakeout!? No, his classmates said he was conservative! Lots to fight about, and boy did people start fighting immediately.
Meanwhile, others were just cracking jokes. And as much as it’s bad to laugh at jokes about violence/death in the abstract, some of them were very good. The best I saw:
Basically, this was like anything else. The internet was first to both accurate information and to conspiracy theories. Tribal partisans were playing detective and yelling at each other. Some people made inappropriate but very funny jokes. Others just checked out of social media entirely. A week later, we’ve all moved on to the next thing and it feels like it’s already been forgotten to some extent. It’s shocking how normal this all felt, like it was the news cycle where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.
The shooter’s social media presence is also fascinating:
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