Confessions of a Disinformer

Did I really start a massive hoax?

Last Friday evening, unable to watch the Mets game due to a broadcasting blackout, I tweeted, “Trump is Dead. He died on Wednesday.” Why? Well, he hadn’t been seen for a couple of days, and it seemed sort of funny to me. I didn’t really have any intent while doing this. It was, in the parlance of our times, a shitpost. And not even that, because that implies a desire to troll or disconcert. I didn’t have any developed motive; I had an impulse. I noticed that some of my funnier friends seemed to think it was funny and were liking it. (Some likes are better than others.) A success! I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke to discover it had received hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of retweets. Naturally, I was delighted. In my mentions were hundreds of angry accusations, some of them real, some of them evidently automated. According to them, I wasn’t just saying he was dead; I was actually calling for his death. I was the enemy. And X was aflame with jokes and memes about Trump’s death. The White House was putting out photos of Trump on his way to golf to prove he was alive. People were scouring TruthSocial posts for signs of a ghostwriter. Did I cause all this? I had trouble finding a post that was earlier or bigger that said the same thing, although I’m sure many people had the same thought about Trump’s absence from the media. Some news outlets—not particularly reputable ones, I must add—credited me as the origin. I think the size of my account and the terse, declarative nature of the post are what propelled it. (The power of rhetoric!)

Did I feel a sense of panic or regret at being the possible origin of mis or disinformation, for having momentarily raised or dashed the hopes of the millions of people who read it? No, not really. Again, I thought it was funny. Maybe this is a little nihilistic of me, but if they believed it, that was on them. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, as a fella said. People who don’t like me sourly remarked it was an unfunny conceit, clearly galled by the fact that I was for a moment the source of near universal mirth. (The haters, they never give it a rest, do they?) Except it wasn’t even really a joke. It was nothing — Barely even a thought. But now I started to entertain ideas: I had moved the dial, I was making the news, making the White House respond, I had some power. I don’t even know for a fact I did it, but I was happy to fancy that I had. In a world where each individual has very little agency, we must seize it where we can. But in reality, I neither thought nor acted: I just posted. This non-thought, this non-action, led to a whole fracas, a big upset, and it was me behind it. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words, but these few were—and, are likely to remain—the most immediately effective and consequential of my entire career.

Saying nothing and feeling self-important about it is not a bad summation of the entire experience of social media. But it was amazing to me how everyone thought it was the result of a very clear plan or an extremely well-defined motivation. One neo-Nazi account said that I was not only wishcasting Trump’s death, but also white genocide in general—I really meant your family. I believe in unconscious fantasies of aggression, but I think I can reasonably acquit myself of daydreaming about mass death for people I’ve never met and have never bothered me. I think my daydreaming was confined to the person in question. Clearly, a lot of people hold similar hopes. Coming from a Nazi, that’s clearly projection and an effort to turn what they thought was propaganda into counter-propaganda. Or maybe they really are just that stupid. One sadistic impulse I will cop to: if it really offended you, then good. Eat it.

But I also have to resist my own desire to dream up a motivation or an intelligence behind what I did: that it was actually very clever of me. It was not. I dreamt up that I’d launched a sophisticated psychological warfare campaign. I was proud of myself, allowing vanity to get the better of me. It was pure chance. My urge to frame it as something other than what it was made me think of a part of Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age,” where he rails against the birth of mass media:

[It] relates to events in equivocating cowardice and vacillation and reinterprets the same thing in all sorts of ways, wants it to be taken as a joke, and when that apparently miscarries, wants it to be taken as an insult, and if that miscarries, claims that nothing was meant at all, that it is supposed to be a witticism, and if that miscarries, explains that it was not meant to be that either, that it was ethical satire, which in fact ought to be of some concern to people, and if that miscarries, says that it is nothing anyone should pay any attention to.

I guess I’m at the final stage now. In a few days, I guarantee no one will remember it.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what moves history along: is it the product of the actions of great men and women, of ideas, material forces, or the rise and decay of institutions? Or are all those things merely illusions and rationalizations, and as Tolstoy concludes at the end of War and Peace, is history simply a vast, buzzing swarm of millions of imperceptible and unconscious individual movements without any single, defining law or master, besides, well, God himself? When you see for a moment how things unfold, when you get to imagine yourself in the driver’s seat, and see what’s grabbing people’s attention, causing a great tumult of emotion and thought, it’s hard not to think of the words Shakespeare gives to Macbeth:

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

In the mass democracy of social media, you too can be that idiot. Or, we can at least imagine ourselves to be the chief idiot for a day.