![]() tells them that he needs their support in order to continue appearing in their feeds at all, and he often speaks about how unfair the situation is to a broadly defined “us.” He connects with them through metrics, and he connects with them as metrics: When the engagement on his posts begins to drop, his followers may feel like they’re the ones who have been silenced, their likes erased like data from a Dominion machine. can’t relate to the material conditions of most Americans’ lives, but he can relate to his followers’ frustration with feeling under-seen on the internet. ![]() This attitude “fits into the broader politics of grievance that defines the Trumpist right,” says Caitlin Petre, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who studies media and digital metrics. (I reached out to the Trump Organization to arrange an interview with Trump Jr., but did not hear back.) He also views the platform that provides them as an unfair and putative authority figure with a political vendetta against him. He considers quantitative data to be key measures of his personal success-as many influencers do. Nevertheless, his metrics’ ups and downs have become a major part of his online identity. Whether his account was being penalized on purpose isn’t clear, and Instagram declined to comment for this story. The engagement rate on his posts was at a high point in October, then fell off by about 75 percent through February. did start seeing changes on his Instagram page after the election. Whatever his end goal, he is succeeding at one thing at the moment: He’s fostering a growing, adoring, monetizable fan base by carrying the torch for what you could call “social-media justice,” a ridiculous but apparently sincere priority for the rising stars of his party. He interprets his father’s style of populism by framing likes, comments, and followers as another set of privileges that have been wrested away from regular people and hoarded by liberals and elites. is laying the groundwork for his own political-possibly presidential-aspirations is unclear, but he’s more than your standard internet attention seeker. ![]() (His highly aggrieved dad, as a reminder, has been kicked off most mainstream platforms.) In the past year or so, he’s made himself the internet’s foremost Aggrieved Influencer. worries about how unfairly he is treated as a content creator and brand. president, including Abraham Lincoln-Trump Jr. frets over how unfairly he was treated as a politician-worse than any other U.S. The platforms that he loves are run by “tyrants” who pick on him because they hate his father, and are fanatical about fact-checking him even when he’s obviously just joking. “Big Tech Censorship is getting worse,” Trump Jr. “Still, like many conservatives, I’ve seen a huge unexplained drop in engagement over the past few months on here.” This probably did not surprise his 4.6 million followers, as he talks about these sorts of “unexplained” phenomena basically all the time. “I wasn’t sure if the info in the image was correct and based on the amount of engagement this post got, it looks like it isn’t,” Trump Jr. With more than half a million likes, the post received about nine times the engagement of one of Trump Jr.’s typical posts, according to data from CrowdTangle-a fact suggesting, in itself, that the meme’s premise was unfounded. gave the meme a caption: “Get to work folks,” he wrote. “If you see this post, please simply comment with ‘Yes’ and then like it.” This exact text-with its specific choice of 7 percent and its ambiguous use of the word our-has been circulating on Instagram since at least the beginning of 2019, when it was debunked as random nonsense. “Instagram has been limiting our posts so that no more than 7% of our friends see our posts,” it reads. Shared in March, it’s a black square with “THIS IS A TEST” written in red across the top. Donald Trump Jr.’s highest-performing Instagram post of the year (so far) is a piece of misinformation.
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