How Trump’s zombie Facebook page became a weird internet memorial

The post has more than 700,000 comments — most of Trump’s preceding posts received between 20,000 and 200,000 — and new replies come in every few minutes. As the first thing that visitors to Trump’s page encounter, it’s become a sort of ad hoc message board for people eager to engage with even the memory of Trump.

“We need to know you hear us,” one supporter wrote on April 15.

“You killed us, but Biden is curing us,” a critic said on April 21.

“Liberals are crazy as hell,” the “Hodgetwins,” two Facebook-famous conservative commentators, wrote on April 3.

“I truly wish Facebook would just delete this page and everything on it. I mean … it’s all a bunch of lies and jokes anyways,” someone wrote on March 14. Two days later, that got a response: “You’re addicted. You’re on a closed account for someone you hate. Get help.”

Whereas Twitter blocked Trump’s account entirely — there’s no way to see, let alone reply to, his old tweets — Facebook’s approach to banning him created space for this small but surprisingly durable pocket of political commentary.

“It’s been fascinating to, every day or every other day when I have some time, go and look at the people who write him,” said Anthony Anderson, a 69-year-old Angeleno who works in education. He’s “trying to get an understanding of how a Trump person thinks, since I live here in liberal L.A., and there are some Trump enthusiasts, but not many that I know. ”

Anderson started checking in on the page in early January but said the Jan. 6 insurrection was what really drew him in. Since then, “I haven’t stayed away.”

Other Trump critics he sees there spend their time trying to fact-check or debate Trump supporters — something Anderson thinks “doesn’t get anywhere.” Instead, he simply replies to Trump enthusiasts’ most effusive comments with a tongue-in-cheek link to an article: “Leaving and Recovering from Cults.”

“That’s my subtle resistance,” Anderson said. “That’s all I do.”

Another recurring visitor to the post — a New Zealander who asked not to be identified by name because “there’s a lot of crazy people out there” — described it as an opportunity for him to fact-check Trump supporters, better understand their worldview and get some entertainment in the process.

“You just get sort of — I wouldn’t say sucked into it — but human nature, you just do the reading of, what are people saying?” he said. Sometimes he pushes back on misinformation, but other times he’ll just “drop a one-liner in” to get a reaction.

“There are a lot of people in there that are just crazies; they’re not there to debate or anything like that,” he said. “And I respect the people that are there to have an argument with you, but there’s a lot of people there. A lot of dating people looking for a date; a lot of people [saying], ‘I can get you bitcoin’ — those opportunists.”

On the other side of those interactions are often vocal conservatives who use their comments to thank Trump for his service, share conspiracies about Joe Biden’s presidential win or rally excitement for a 2024 Trump comeback. For some, posting there fulfills an emotional need.

“For those die-hard Trump fans and supporters, this site can represent a location for a parasocial relationship … [or] a one-sided relationship,” said Natalie Pennington, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “These people feel like they’re close to Trump even though they don’t know him, which is why you see them commenting in a way that is directed at him as if he is the one that is reading and writing and responding — even though he’s obviously not responding, since he’s banned.”

Pennington’s research has explored how people engage with the Facebook accounts of their dead friends and family members. She noted parallels between that grief and what Trump’s most persistent Facebook fans express: “We don’t always have the closure we want, or we have feelings that remain over time.… For people who were upset that Trump lost the election, those feelings aren’t just going to go away four months later. And so the page becomes a place for them to continue those conversations amongst each other.”

That behavior, she said, is an extension of older, pre-internet forms of coping: visiting a gravesite, for instance, or attending a funeral.

But for others, commenting on a months-old post from a banned former president is a pale imitation of the direct line of communication with Trump that they used to have and want back.

“In Telegram, you can actually go to some groups and they post the things that Trump writes out because he has a website too,” said Ruth Andrews, 42, referencing an encrypted messaging app and Trump’s new personal website, respectively. In those ways, “I feel like I can still be in touch with what he’s saying.”

Andrews, who lives in Oklahoma and is unemployed, did comment below Trump’s Facebook post one time, though, after his page showed up in her news feed. “I can’t believe Facebook put him back up,” she wrote, echoing a recurring mistake wherein commenters see Trump’s old post, think it’s a new one, and assumes he’s been permitted to return.

“I thought they deleted the whole [page], kind of like what Twitter did,” Andrews said. “Because on Twitter, you can’t find anything. The whole thing was gone, poof. So I thought Facebook did the same.”

It didn’t, though. Even in Trump’s absence, his page is still up, his final post is still visible, and its comments section still slowly accumulating replies from people who can’t stop thinking about the man who isn’t there.