Longer-form writing on the Baby Trump genre, the creators working in it, and the editorial choices behind the daily feed. New pieces published as the genre evolves.
Spend an afternoon watching the top of the Baby Trump feed and a pattern emerges that has almost nothing to do with politics. The videos that travel are doing something specific with timing, framing, and reference density that the fail-state videos miss.
The Baby Trump videos surfacing in our daily feed look new, but they sit at the end of a long, well-documented line of political caricature. The technology has changed several times. The underlying impulse hasn't changed at all.
If you scroll through our feed for any length of time, one channel name shows up over and over: Baby News Network. Of the fifty-two videos in the current daily index, thirty-seven of them are from BNN.
Every morning at 13:00 UTC our system runs through several dozen Baby Trump videos surfaced overnight and surfaces the ones worth your attention. The pipeline behind it isn't simple.