The Internet Won’t Be the Same After Trump

President Donald Trump has changed the internet in obvious ways. During his first term, Americans have watched his administration relish the opportunity to destroy net neutrality—the core principle of a free and open internet. We’ve had to ask whether social-media platforms should penalize the president for threatening and glorifying violence and whether the president might in turn just ban internet companies he doesn’t like. We’ve seen some people on the internet turn into emotionally-numb doom-scrollers, while others have joined the #Resistance, engaging in viral virtue signaling and creating a micro-economy of political merch. But Trump’s impact on the internet is bigger than its weirdest memes or its most prolonged Twitter fights. His presidency has changed how Americans communicate with one another on the internet, heightening its tone of divisiveness and suspicion, shaping its norms and rules, and creating an expectation that each day online will be more surreal than the one before. We’ll look back at these years as an era of major upheaval in nearly everything about being online: The internet is a fundamentally different place from what it was in 2016, and using it the way many people do, the president’s influence is undeniable. Four years in, Americans are only starting to get a sense of how President Trump has altered daily American life. Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we can expect four of the biggest changes to last.