Jude Joffe Block

This is something that actually helped propel Trump back into the White House in 2024.

These MAGA-friendly influencers and podcasters and the dynamics on X were helpful to his campaign and now are continuing to be.

You know, we talked with Renee DiResta,

She's a professor at Georgetown University who says these influencers are part of what she calls the propaganda machine of this administration, that they get special treatment, they get access, they are invited to certain briefings and roundtables.

ice ride alongs.

And then they create this viral content that then can be used to justify policies.

And so I think that's something new.

And she says, you know, in the past, we might have thought of propaganda as something that state run or top down media, but it's now this relationship with creators that should be considered.

I mean, what's interesting, thinking about Minnesota, is that some of these influencers who are on the ground are, you know, showing video clips, showing ICE taking increasingly aggressive actions.

steps and tactics towards protesters and even just people in cars who seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I mean, there's video of people being pulled out of their cars, their windows smashed.

And there's influencers sharing this saying, you know,

I voted for this, you know, like sharing it gleefully to show the might of the ICE agents on the ground.

It raises a question.

What happens when some of this video starts to circulate more widely and a bigger swath of the public is seeing this?

And I asked this to Whitney Phillips.

She's a professor at University of Oregon who studies how people interact with information.

Well, and I think one of the key issues with being terminally online is that, of course, you know, the algorithms reward, you know, divisive, you know, rage-baity content that makes us angry, that makes us feel motivated to share it and kind of divides us further.

And this coarsening of the rhetoric is really the key here to think about, because the risk here is that it becomes such a turnoff, not just the onlineness, but the

the kind of rhetoric that being online encourages is what could really turn people off from tuning into politics to tuning into political news, that it could just feel so toxic that they have to tune out.