Never been real. "Trending on twitter" has always been a giant astroturfing scheme

We didn't NEED twitter to know Britney Spears was a popstar. You heard Baby One More Time everywhere. We didn't need Twitter to have PlayStation 2s sell out, you saw people on street corners scalping them. True fashion trends don't get advertised into reality, they just happen (short denim shorts early 2000s)

Back then astroturfing was done via network news and radio...but it couldn't compete with the speed of the internet or even in real life word of mouth. So the world, though it was still blanketed in a massive lie, was still a bit more real of a place.

That's why they invented web 2.0 and social media, because they needed to control the SPREAD OF INFORMATION. They needed to prove they could control public opinion en masse in spite of facts and truth. Back to the gaming...

The Xbox 360 had the highest failure rate in a piece of consumer electronics ever. It was produced by Microsoft who already had a horrible reputation in Europe over anti trust issues and an even worse reputation in the US over how awful Windows ME and Vista were...

Yet the 360 was still able to massively outsell the PlayStation 3 in spite of the original Xbox user base being smaller than the PS1 and PS2, in spite of the fact that your 360 console would break within the first year without exception, in spite of the fact there were NO games aside Halo/Gears of War, and online play was $10 a month when it was free on PS3 and PC.

Why? Because the internet was used to its full power to astroturf the PS3 into NEAR failure. Jokes about $599 launch price (even though Xbox was still $400, and the PS3 merited the cost because it had a 3 times bigger hard drive, a Full HD bluray player, and played 3 whole generations of games) and the belief that "PlayStation had no games" (which is BS because Sony is still rereleasing remasters of PS3 games and they're always highly rated best sellers) Even the sheer fact that no PlayStation 3s broke while the Red Ring of Death was everywhere..nothing could stop the 360

THAT'S SOCIAL MEDIA AND INTERNET BASED ASTROTURFING. You can use specific tactics to turn a fabricated opinion into a "reality"

They did it here first, knowing full well those SAME tactics would be used to reshape society to their liking. For the record, in every other country the 360 sold very poorly and the universal consensus was it had no games and even if you liked the few game it has, your console would burn into a paperbrick mid game.

Things that are real, like Britney, like the PlayStation 2, like short shorts, they don't need manipulation and coercion to catch on. Case in point, the Wii, or the iPhone and iPad

Biggest case in point..Trump

All the astroturfing in the world, the pussy tape, the 99% chance of losing predicted by every single expert, massive internationally coordinated hit pieces..and he still caught on and WON. Why do you think they went so far to steal it?

Because they know it's over, the experiment is done, meme warfare and the conversations people have in private mean they can no longer control public opinion, regardless of how many tweet farms and bots they have