Donald Trump is back on Facebook but who cares?

If the former president’s power to shock has waned, it’s because we have become wise to the disintegration of truth online. We’ve done this already; how long until we’ve all just had enough?

Donald Trump will be readmitted to Facebook. Do we care? Picture: AFP.

Who have you missed more: Donald Trump or Nick Clegg? These past few months the former president of the United States has been a sort of brooding background irritation, like a smoke detector you occasionally hear somewhere else in the house in the middle of the night. “Sooner or later,” you may have thought to yourself, “I’ll have to pay some attention to this.” As for Meta’s president of global affairs (Clegg), I must admit I’d very nearly forgotten all about him. Not sure where he’s been. Maybe the Metaverse?

Last week, anyway, both were back, because it fell to Clegg to announce that Trump is to be readmitted to Facebook. You remember. Along with Twitter, it suspended him in early 2021, after months of Trump claiming that the 2020 US election had been fraudulent and the platforms slapping labels on to his posts saying it hadn’t been. Then that mob of naked people in astonishing hats stormed the Capitol and they all kicked him off, on the basis that it had definitely been his fault. Although now he is back on.

Amusingly enough, this actually presents Trump with a bit of a problem. Until now, his online presence has been confined to Truth Social, the Twitter alternative he set up himself a couple of years ago, and to which he is contractually obliged to post his thoughts at least six hours before he posts them anywhere else. This raises the delightful prospect of Donald Trump being sued by Donald Trump, which I honestly don’t think we can rule out.

anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West was readmitted to Twitter then banned again. Picture: AFP.

What interests me about all this, anyway, is how little it seems to matter. Whatever the platform, are we convulsed by dread at the thought of the ex-president finally having a fully functioning smartphone back in his tiny orange fingers? Because I don’t think we are. Partly this is because Trump feels like yesterday’s man, not that you can ever quite bet on that. It is also partly because Facebook feels like yesterday’s platform, although it’s still a goldmine for political fundraising.

It’s more, though, that the whole fight, the whole anxiety, just feels like yesterday’s business. Crazy people will say crazy things. Sometimes, other people will try to shut them up. We know this. Such is life.

Trump has also, of course, been readmitted to Twitter, but that seems to matter even less because so has everybody else. If there was any coherent philosophy behind Elon Musk’s purchase of the site, then it was demonstrated in November when he readmitted not just Trump but also the antisemitic rapper Kanye West and the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.

I wouldn’t say this was a glorious success because Trump still doesn’t use the site, Kanye was re-banned a few hours later and Tate is now in jail. Still, they were totemic of the idea that the age of liberal censorship was over, and the site’s algorithms have been tweaked that way too.

For users – if not for Twitter itself, which has shed advertisers like dandruff – the upshot has been bleak but hardly apocalyptic. The place is just a mess. You log on, you get unaccountably furious about 19 different things within five minutes, you log off again.

British-US former professional kickboxer and controversial influencer Andrew Tate (C) and his brother Tristan Tate (R) arrive handcuffed and escorted by police at a courthouse in Bucharest. Picture: AFP.

None of it really seems to matter. It is as if the great internet argument, about what should be allowed and how, has burnt itself out. It just feels exhausting now, and maybe pointless too.

The reasons for this are largely bad. For one thing, we have learnt that trying to stamp out extremism and conspiracy theories on the internet is a Sisyphean task, and the only variable is how badly you’ll fail. Just over a year ago, researchers from Cardiff University did a study on what happened when high-profile Covid conspiracists were banned from Facebook, focusing particularly on a former nurse who called the NHS “the new Auschwitz” and David Icke, who basically believes all bad things ever. They found that their removal had limited effect and could even reinforce the determination of their followers.

Fast-forward to today and you have the same nonsense being spouted in the House of Commons by Andrew Bridgen. Would it ever have been possible to ban enough people to keep those ideas from lodging in his tiny brain? I’m not sure it would.

There’s also, undeniably, a sense that mainstream media has cheerfully picked up the baton. Mark Steyn, a thunderingly powerful right-wing columnist in his day, is being investigated by Ofcom over misleading claims made on his show on GB News about vaccines, including one in which Naomi Wolf likened them to “mass murder”.

Then President Donald Trump meets with rapper Kanye West in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP.

Neil Oliver, on the same station, will give you basically every neurotic pandemic conspiracy there has ever been, often in the space of a single rant. Here at least they brush up against broadcasting regulations; something that American talk channels don’t need to worry about, thanks to the First Amendment. What this represents is a hunger for relevance. A fear that audiences who don’t get what they want on the television screen will get it from another screen, instead. And they will.

Next to all that, the question of whether or not Trump is allowed to post on Facebook begins to feel rather quaint. Perhaps one day they’ll ban him again, and perhaps they’ll be right to, but at this stage maybe it’s all so much pissing in the wind. That disintegration of truth, facilitated by social media and exploited by politicians, has become endemic. You might as well try to unbake a cake.

The best you can hope for, I suppose, is that the same sense of ennui settles upon voters too. Once, the political transgressions through which the likes of Trump came to dominate politics were exciting to some and enraging to others, but impossible to ignore either way. Perhaps, though, it just gets boring. We’ve seen where these fights go, in every direction. We’ve done this already. How long until we’ve all just had enough?

The Times