After all the jokes, my serious take:
By the numbers, no person in all of human history has shared a greater number of conspiracy theories with a greater number of people than Donald Trump did through social media.
This pipeline is now cut off, which is a "really big deal."
For our LikeWar book, I actually read every Trump tweet, going back to his first.
The sheer scale of not just the lies and insults in mindnumbing obviously, but he was also notable for just how many conspiracy theories he fed fire too long before presidency.
It hit topics from well known ones like his birtherism to other ones that are even more despicable now like aiding anti-vaxxers. Indeed, on that last one, my worry was that after Biden came in, he would pivot back to that theme, to stoke anger and bring attention back to himself
We argued in book that the path to making the internet less toxic are the superspreaders. IE, just like in public health, instead of trying to police everyone, focus on those key nodes that effect everyone.
Well, the largest superspreader of proven false conspiracy theories in human history is finally unable to operate in the same way.
