Nuance in the Distraction Age: College Students Can Revive Quality Speech

By Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27

“STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY,” wrote President Trump in a recent Truth Social post. “STOP THE WINDMILLS.” A likely interpretation is that Trump blames wind power for New Jersey's 28% energy price hike. 

Trump’s posts have a singular style. They often feature entirely capitalized sentences, replete with incendiary language that makes somewhat banal news – about windmills, for example – attention-grabbing. His communications are so distinctive and effective that Governor Gavin Newsom has adopted it for his own virality needs. Trolling Trump, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted: “FOX & MAGA HAVE NEWSOM DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!!! THEY SHOULD CRY HARDER! SAD!!!” Newsom’s parody account has been a smash hit. In the past month, he has gained over a quarter million followers and more than 225 million impressions on X. 

We watch as political discourse decays into nonsense. To match Trump’s influence, Newsom did what social media algorithms required of him: he chose spectacle over substance. As one Politico journalist put it, this digital sparring is “like peering into the near future of what a post-literate presidential campaign might look like.”  

There are major implications for us, the constituents, who not only receive this rhetoric, but who may adapt our speech in response. Today, we live in a digital terrain that rewards extreme, emotional, and controversial speech by boosting its visibility and reach. Trump is both a symptom of this toxic terrain and its wellspring – more than any other president, he has made captivating national attention his daily mission. What we’ve learned from his communication tactics is substantial: in our age of distraction, pandering to the algorithm gets you a platform. To go viral, stay shallow, short, and emotional.

Research shows that there’s an inverse relationship between virality and nuance, broadly defined. In an analysis of over 300 million English social media comments over three decades, linguists discovered a general decrease in the length of comments and lexical richness. That is, our speech has become less sophisticated over time – our vocabulary less varied and meaningful. Similarly, in a 2023 study, a research group found that information-scarce tweets are disseminated faster than those with high lexical density. Simply put: less substance translates into more retweets. 

Emotional resonance is also a key component of virality. In 2010, two Wharton professors found that emotionally charged New York Times articles were more likely to be sent around via email than neutral articles. A 2023 study of Twitter found a similar pattern: Tweets with negative sentiment spread faster than neutral or positive ones.

What does this tell us? Speech's currency is less about content, and more about attention-capture. Messaging that is able to cut through the noise and reach our senses, overwhelmed by stimuli, might just be the most valuable. This is not a new phenomenon. In Roman times, town square orators also had to reel their audiences in. But what’s different today is that algorithms narrow what kind of speech succeeds in the public forum. Silicon Valley engineers determine what comments are worthy of dissemination, and the way we communicate is changing as a result.

It’s clear, then, why Trump’s style is so successful. By calling windmills “stupid” and “ugly,” rather than attempting to demonstrate this alleged impact on energy costs, Trump appeases our collective attention deficits. 

To fight the atrophying of our speech will be arduous. Ultimately, it will require us to recapture our attentional capacities from the algorithms, allowing us to decide for ourselves what speech is worthy of our energy.

College students have a leg up in the endeavor to revive quality speech. In seminars, we are encouraged to have reasoned debates, characterized by critical thinking rather than rage bait. Good professors give us time and resources to study multiple angles of an issue, leading us to draw conclusions that are grounded in research and reason. Our papers aren’t written to be “buzzy,” but to inform, explore, and create. When we are the coders, politicians, tweeters, and consumers, ourselves part of the communication apparatus, we must do better. 

In these exploratory four years, complexity is our capital. Let’s resist attention-seeking soundbites and opt for more responsible speech – we’re in just the place to do so.

Marisa Warman Hirschfeld ’27 studies History and Creative Writing and is a Princetonians for Free Speech Writing Fellow