Trump's Social Media Summit Will Star Far-Right Propagandists

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016, some of the Internet's most notorious right-wing meme enthusiasts could scarcely believe what their movement had helped to accomplish. "We actually elected a meme as president," a 4chan user wrote as Trump's victory became official. "The election was won by a bunch of people making memes,” declared Chuck Johnson, the alt-right blogger and alleged Holocaust denier with whom Trump consulted when selecting Cabinet officials. “We memed the president into existence.”

Now, with his 2020 re-election bid officially underway, Trump is using the power of his office to further amplify those voices. On Thursday, the White House will host a summit to discuss "the power of social media," and what a spokesperson calls the "opportunities and challenges" presented by "today's online environment.”

Notably absent from the guest list are representatives from Facebook, Twitter, or any other actual social media companies. Instead, the president invited "digital leaders" like James O'Keefe, famous for publishing secretly-recorded videos designed to bolster conservative conspiracy theories; Bill Mitchell, a prolific (and early) pro-Trump Twitter personality-turned-QAnon conspiracy theorist; and filmmaker Ali Alexander, whose debate-night tweet questioning Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris's blackness was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. (The president's son later deleted it, and a spokesperson called the incident a misunderstanding.)

Ben Garrison, whose political cartoons have been described by the Anti-Defamation League as permeated with "right-wing, anti-government, and conspiratorial themes," announced his plans to attend earlier this week. According to Politico, the White House has since rescinded his invitation, but his tweet celebrating the occasion—a triumphant "MEME WARRIORS ASSEMBLE!"—remains.

The social media summit is not the first instance in which Trump has taken such a keen personal interest in the activities of his most online supporters. According to the Washington Post, the president took a 20-minute Oval Office meeting last week with a pair of Twitter users that the Post identifies only by their handles, @mad_liberals and @CarpeDonktum. The latter is responsible for a video collage of faux TIME magazine covers depicting Trump as president in perpetuity. Trump tweeted the clip out to his tens of millions of followers on June 21; to date, it's been viewed nearly 26 million times.

From the Post:

Trump, who has accused Twitter of playing "political games" with his follower count, is one of many conservative politicians and personalities who publicly assert—without evidence—that social media companies actively discriminate against them. In May, the White House even launched a public survey tool asking users to share their personal stories of such viewpoint discrimination and, many prospective summit attendees seem especially eager to sound off on the issue. A representative from conservative YouTube channel PragerU told the Post that he credits his White House invitation to the company's litigation with Google, while Turning Point USA director Charlie Kirk "expects the conversation to touch on questions of whether a company the size of Google is too powerful and should be investigated as a monopoly." Congressman Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who threatened to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over an an alleged Twitter "shadow-ban" in 2018, will be in the Oval Office on Thursday as well.

Also relevant to Trump's 2016 victory, of course, were the efforts of Russian intelligence to spread disinformation and promote his candidacy on social media. A popular pro-Trump Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, was revealed in 2017 to be the creation of a group backed by the Russian government. Earlier this week, Yahoo News reported that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory—that a DNC staffer murdered in a 2016 D.C. mugging was assassinated by Democrats after providing Hillary Clinton's emails to WikiLeaks—was an elaborate Kremlin hoax, too.

By excluding social media companies and tech experts from the event, Trump sets up his "social media summit" as a de facto gripe session for conservative provocateurs. Their inflammatory memes and fake news stories—like the contributions of the Kremlin—are good for his re-election efforts, and so it is worth his time to give their claims of victimhood a platform. Cracking down on such misinformation is a more formidable task for social media companies when the president publicly boosts the notion that any tech companies who try to eliminate hate speech or otherwise enforce their terms of service are in fact engaged in politically-motivated censorship.

Earlier this year, a Politico investigation warned that the looming disinformation epidemic of 2020 will be far worse than what Americans endured in 2016. By insisting that "bias against conservatives" is The Big Social Media Problem of the moment—and not, for example, the ongoing efforts of hostile foreign powers to meddle in American elections—Trump increases his odds of once again being disinformation's primary beneficiary.

Originally Appeared on GQ