On Thursday afternoon, just as the titans of the pro-Trump internet gathered at the White House to commiserate about Big Tech’s tyrannous reign of censorship over conservative speech, the entire world was briefly deplatformed by a global Twitter blackout.

If a gaggle of memelords cavort with the president and no one tweets about it, did it even happen?

That’s a loaded question, given that the White House’s “social media summit” wasn’t actually about assembling the internet’s greatest minds for a freewheeling discussion on policy. Like any good Trump event, the spectacle is more important than the discussion. The president is a master media manipulator and his “summit” was an excellent case study.

The decision to invite a collection of Photoshoppers, conspiracy peddlers and grandfatherly, semipro Twitter fighters to the White House was a maneuver designed to outrage. That outrage inevitably led to press coverage, as evidenced by the dozens of curtain-raising pieces from technology and political reporters who’ve covered these personalities from their days of obscurity. Coverage leads to more condemnations. Then, more coverage. An hourlong meeting about technology with a president who has never used email becomes a circus, which boosts the profile of each meeting attendee.

In the age of viral politics, momentum and agenda-setting are born on social media. The ability to program Twitter, for example, is the ability to dictate the news cycle. And when what you tap out on your palm-size screen shows up on cable news chyrons, that translates into TV appearances, more earned media and a nontrivial amount of political capital.