In the wake of the 2024 presidential election that saw the far-right make wide gains among previously strong democratic voter bases, news influencers on social media appear to be leaning more right in a new Pew Research Center study.
Conservative news influencers dominated almost all of the largest social media platforms, the study found, securing a large advantage on Facebook and more moderate but still clear advantages on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. The only platform that conservatives didn’t see an advantage was TikTok, which has a smaller gender gap as opposed to the other four platforms that outnumber women almost 2-1.
What’s particularly troubling if you’re on the left and aren’t looking for a reactionary-based society, is that a growing number of adults in the United States are now getting their news from social media influencers. According to the same Pew Research Center survey, 21 percent of adults are using social media to gather their news with 18-29-year-olds making up the majority of the findings at 37 percent.
“News influencers have emerged as one of the key alternatives to traditional outlets as a news and information source for a lot of people, especially younger folks,” said the study’s co-author Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew Research Center, in a news release. “And these influencers have really reached new levels of attention and prominence this year amid the presidential election.”
NBC News
These numbers and findings continue to illustrate the arrogance of the Democratic party, who automatically assume minority groups and in turn, young people are some monolith when it comes to voting. If you’re going to appeal to a voting base, whether that be Millennials or Zoomers, who have both suffered tremendously under neoliberalism, you’re going to have to offer more than milquetoast, status quo, centrism, and stop employing the Harry Sisson’s and Olivia Juliana’s of the world to deliver that stale message. Namely, you simply cannot fight right wing populism with tired old moderate neoliberalism, you need to fight it with left wing populism. And until the Democratic party realizes that, which they more than likely never will, they’ll continue to keep losing ground, especially if the right has found its footing when it comes to the news on social media platforms.
