ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dynamics of US American Twitter responses to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa of 2013–5. Particularly, it focuses on Donald Trump’s role in the ‘Ebola scare’ – he tweeted more than a hundred times about Ebola late in 2014 and early in 2015 – in order to gauge how Trump found his feet as a social media agitator. The chapter argues that Trump and activists/social media marketeers around him learned from the Birther movement and the Ebola scare how to act as ‘superspreaders’ of viral content by employing the racialized contagions they were virtually engaging with.
