After the Verizon outage, the Trump administration needs to touch grass
The outage exposed the inner workings of the administration’s propaganda machine and how vulnerable it is.
For ten hours yesterday, a massive Verizon outage knocked out the internet for a huge swath of the country. It caused chaos, cutting Verizon customers off from directions on Google maps, leaving businesses unable to accept online payments, and healthcare providers incapable of communicating with patients. In many ways, a disaster.
For 10 blissful hours, millions of people in New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, and all over America couldn’t access social media and the firehose of nightmarish images and video of violent ICE raids and teargassed protestors. They were essentially involuntarily bricked out of their phones.
(Everyone’s Bricking. Buying a $59 doodad that locks you out of your most toxic apps unless you physically tap it. Because we literally can’t look away.)
But it wasn’t just that users were cut off from the infinite scroll horror show.
Trump was cut off from his audience.
What’s an attention-obsessed narcissist without a captive audience? If a tree falls in the woods, etc.
Manufacturing Chaos for Clicks
This administration runs on chaos the way America runs on Dunkin’. It’s literally baked into their official communications strategy, which comes directly from the top. ICE, specifically, has built a social media machine meant to pump out content to satisfy Trump’s demand to “flood the airwaves.”
The Washington Post reported on this and showed the receipts. ICE’s internal messages reveal an aggressive operation to churn out viral videos of immigration raids and tactical operations.
They’re running the ICE communications shop like a TikTok hype house, tracking the analytics on videos of immigrants being chased, grabbed, and violently detained across all of their Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and X posts.
They’re pushing a team of right wing influencers and edgelords to go out and capture the most “cinematic” images. The production team back at HQ cuts together footage set to copyrighted music - Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “American Bitch” - and juices the algorithm so these videos ricochet across the internet, straight into our phones, where we can’t look away.
And we shouldn’t. We need to bear witness to what’s going on. Otherwise this administration has carte blanche to continue to assault and kill Americans in the streets.
The Algorithm is the Point
Reader support makes this work possible.
Without the views, the likes, and the shares, what incentive is there to keep making “content?”
You think Kristi Noem is putting on a full face if there’s no one looking at it?
Without distribution, the propaganda machine grinds to a halt.
This administration’s greatest weapon is the internet. It’s why they’ve kicked journalists out of the briefing room and replaced them with an army of sycophantic right wing influencers. And because those influencers don’t push back and just parrot whatever the administration tells them to say, they’re getting unfettered access to primo content.
An instagrammer livestreamed from the tarmac in Texas while Pete Hegseth cosplayed with the military this week.
MAGA Rasputin, Laura Loomer practically has a standing appointment in the Oval Office.
A 23 year-old influencer, Nick Shirley, briefed the President at the White House on “Antifa,” based solely on the merit of his YouTube following.
This matters because it was Shirley’s “independent reporting” on Youtube that claimed to expose widespread fraud by Somali-run daycares in Minnesota that Trump cited as the main reason for launching the ICE assault on Minneapolis in the first place.
None of this happens without the internet.
The Feedback Loop
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. These videos go viral on social media because the Right will smash that like, repost, watch and laugh as the world burns.
The Left will quote-tweet, and repost the videos to express their outrage. But that also amplifies the message, ensuring Trump’s violence and chaos reaches as many eyeballs as possible.
And that’s what they really care about. Impressions, engagement, virality.
To Be Clear
I’m not arguing that a nationwide infrastructure failure is a good thing. Far from it - without the internet, there’s no historical record. Trump’s goons could operate with impunity. Immigrants will disappear without a trace, protestors will be beaten and now, killed. And there would be absolutely no accountability.
But even a ten hour outage deprived the dumpster fire of oxygen.
And that makes it crystal clear that Trump does all this for one reason. It’s not to make America great again, or deliver on a single one of his promises to his supporters.
It’s to feed his ego.
And it only works if we’re watching.
Should we stop looking? I would like nothing more than for them to lose oxygen.
My protest sign says:
NO TAX DOLLARS FOR ICE VIOLENCE