I am writing this chapter, against my will, because people still love to scoff at the significance of Twitter and its culture of abuse. It’s “just” social media. Tweets are “just” tweets. I pale at the need to explain this, but “just” tweets such as “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!,” when tweeted by the president, actually matter quite a bit, because Trump’s endgame, communications-wise, is to silo his supporters to the point that he is literally their only trusted source of news, opinion, and truth—and Twitter is the platform on which he talks to them. It matters.
