The word edgelord may have been unfamiliar to Adrian Chiles – but Anthony Lawton says we’re all victims of the online provocateurs, one of them in particular
Adrian Chiles (Opinion, 4 June) has just discovered the word edgelord – a term that was new to me too – and now he sees it everywhere. He’s not wrong: it’s rife on social media, in podcasts and in YouTube comments. But how did he overlook the edgelord-in-chief himself?
Donald Trump is the archetypal edgelord: endlessly provocative, chronically online, allergic to truth and addicted to the attention his outrage generates. He didn’t just dabble in edgelordery for clicks – he built his own social media megaphone to broadcast it. It’s as if Truth Social had been handed the nuclear codes.