> It's not at all a given that Trump's rise was not due to social media, it is the very crux of this argument. What do you think is more likely, that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because Trump was popular, or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil and the US?

Trump's rise was aided, fueled by social media, but it was not singularly caused by social media. Despite being the ultimate outside president, Trump has been involved in politics for decades as a donor. He had a brief third party presidential campaign in 2000. He moderated a Republican primary debate for the 2012 elections. In terms of playing populist fringe conspiracy theory movements, he was a major figure in the Birther movement during the Obama administration. He didn't spring from nowhere from the forehead of the Twitter.

Furthermore, Trump being a celebrity and highly public figure for decades is also pertinent. He was on a highly-watched network TV reality show prior to his presidential run. He was a household name. And most importantly, traditional news stations aided and abetted his rise. CNN devoted massive amounts of free airtime to covering the Trump campaign as rating bait during 2015 and 2016:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/media/jeff-zucke...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trump-gets-wa...

The role of traditional media during that election can absolutely not be discounted. If millions of older, less online voters saw Trump's scandals and excesses on cable news just as they did on social media, you cannot single out social media as the sole cause of Trump's rise. Cable news networks were falling over themselves to chase the same engagement incentives as social media likewise does with clickbait.

> or both Bolsonaro and Trump had a push from similar phenomena in highly disparate countries like Brazil

What's most likely is that people in Brazil voted for Bolsonaro because he is popular there. And that is both because of activity on social media, and activity offline. And the similar phenomena in highly disparate countries, the populist push, might be helped along by social media, but is not solely responsible by social media.

> And that election ended with a 82% win for Chirac.

And regardless of how this year's election will go (fwiw, Macron is currently leading Le Pen in the forecasts), Macron still won in 2017, a year in which social media existed, 66.1% to 33.9%.

> I feel that both here and in many other places your arguments can be boiled down to "other factors than social media exist" and "crazy people/political movements existed before social media". Both are truisms.

And they are true.

> Yet we see their influence rising recently.

Social media is the newest form of media, but it is still a medium just like all of the media that have been affected politics in the past.

Ross Perot was at times polling as the front-runner in the 1992 presidential election; he then suspended and then un-suspended his campaign and still got nearly 19% of the popular vote anyway. As a third-party independent outsider candidate, he gained immense traction even before the existence of social media; he bought out TV airtime and aired infomercials about his platform.

> The issue is not that people like Glenn Beck always existed, it is that they are electing presidents.

Before Trump there was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, a man who had just as many personal scandals as Trump and was literally a media tycoon. A figure who while far from a political neophyte when he became prime minister, similarly had his name blanketed throughout TV airwaves using populist rhetoric. Trump is far from the first national leader of his kind.

Also, as a quibble, Beck became a fairly anti-Trump figure in 2016 and as a consequence, is no longer a leading conservative talking head leading light.

Populists have always existed. Mass communications have existed throughout the twentieth century. The intermix of both have existed since radio populists in the 1930s. Social media is a powerful medium, but it is one of many. To assign it some sort of exceptionalism is to be myopic of history.

(Celebrity candidates have also always existed. This whole discussion subthread was about the 2000s. Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor? Surely having preexisting name recognition and being a popular public figure can lead to victory, even in the absence of any sort of executive experience?)

In modern times, if we hear about a political campaign with a large spending budget, we automatically assume it to be in a leading position. Why? Because that war chest can be used to buy internet ads, TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, billboard ads, fliers, and armies of volunteers to knock on doors. If a cause is everywhere in the consciousness of voters, then it has a higher probability of being supported by those voters. So why what makes social media any different? It would seem the major difference is that social media is unregulated, unlike those older traditional forms of media. It does not have the same of set of restrictions for political advertising, and thus content gets propagated and can be much wilder. (And there is so much of it.) So yes, social media and its effects on political discourse should be studied, and it should be regulated to be more in line with other forms of media, at least the major platforms.

But it's not magic. It doesn't automatically win or lose elections all on its own. And going back to the point of this entire subthread, plenty of factors existed to cause tempers to run hot and become to become internally divided beyond social media. I maintain again that social media is no different than FOX News or pre-social media online forums that existed in the 2000s. They are accelerants that speed up an already-burning fire.