Trump has always drawn ideas from the darker corners of the Internet like 90s web forums xoxohth and autoadmit, but his new opponent has found a different kind of traction by embracing the Web’s native formats.

This past week, the Presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris played out online, side by side, as if in split screen. Last Monday, after a delay of more than half an hour due to technical difficulties, Trump participated in a glitchy two-hour-long conversation with Elon Musk that was live-streamed on X, formerly Twitter, a platform that Musk owns and has turned into his personal pulpit. Behind-the-scenes photos showed Trump hunched over an iPhone, lacking even a microphone, in a Mar-a-Lago meeting room decorated with a flattering painting of himself. Musk trumpeted that the event had nearly a billion views, but, according to the Times, listenership peaked at around seven hundred thousand, and statistics from the Web-analytics firm Similarweb suggest it added only five per cent to X’s normal traffic. In contrast to the meandering live stream, which resembled a relic from the pandemic-era chat app Clubhouse, Harris’s @KamalaHQ TikTok account was posting daily videos in the Internet’s meme-based vernacular, netting many millions of views. If you don’t understand why clips of the newly named Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz were set to a voice-over from the reality show “Love Island” announcing, “This week, a hot new bombshell enters the villa,” well, you might not be online enough.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5793011&forum_id=2...id.#49398529)