Twitter Is Real Life Now

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The phrase “Twitter isn’t real life” has never seemed less true. That’s not to say the average Twitter user is the average American—which is usually what people mean by that statement. It’s to say that real life now happens on Twitter. It’s the center of the country’s political universe, for better or worse. On Sunday, when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race, staffers working on his reelection campaign learned about his historic decision the same way as everybody else: via a letter posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

This isn’t unprecedented. Lest we forget, in 2011, Twitter users learned, through the grapevine, of the death of Osama bin Laden approximately twenty minutes before Obama marched up to a podium and gave a televised speech announcing the elimination of the al-Qaeda leader. 

Of course, the real shift came with Donald Trump. The former Twitter superuser communicated directly with the public via the site—and occasionally his own staff. He fired multiple members of his administration via tweeting, including Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. After being kicked off Twitter after the Capitol Riots on January 6—which he tweeted throughout—Trump has continued to release frequent and self-written proclamations via Truth Social, his own proprietary Twitter-clone site. 

Despite Biden’s positioning of  himself as Trump’s nemesis and promising a return to normalcy, his anticlimactic decision to post a history-changing announcement on Twitter is a Trumpian move—something previous presidents, including Obama, his former boss, wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. In the past, such an important moment would have required pomp and circumstance, TV crews, flags flying in the background. But now the line between the online and real world has become so blurred that it hardly seems worth it to step in front of a camera and address the nation. If you want to do that, why not do it online? After all, it’s likely more people will see it that way. (Of course, had he done it in person, people on Twitter probably wouldn’t be sharing memes about “Kamala hitting send tweet.”) 

Soon after Biden’s announcement, his vice president and handpicked successor redesigned her Twitter banner in “brat style” after British musician Charli XCX—whose latest album is called Brat—posted her support. A more online version of “Pokemon Go to the Polls,” this may have embarrassed me as a Charli XCX fan, but as an American too young to remember much about politics before the Twitter era, it didn’t surprise me. Politicians used to avoid subculture, pantomiming union Joes and small-business owners in ads where they sit around the dinner table, bills scattered about, insisting they were just like you. But now you are online, and they are too. The distinction between the online and offline exists as a matter of degree, not fact, and it grows lighter every day.

River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice, and read his piece “How Rednecks Like Me Hear J.D. Vance.”