A file photo of white smoke billowing out from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and announcing that a new pope has been elected on March 13, 2013. More than 1.3 million tweets have been published on X about the conclave, according to monitoring platform Visibrain, while TikTok videos on the topic have been viewed over 363 million times on the network with unparallelled reach among the young. — AP
PARIS: Hype has been building on social media around the Catholic Church's secretive, centuries-old tradition of conclaves to elect a new pope, animating users from the White House on down.
US President Donald Trump on May 3 posted an apparently AI-generated image of himself wearing papal vestments and sitting on a throne, one finger directed to the heavens.
