After years of staying on the sidelines, content creators became part of the mainstream political media this year, offering news, analysis and political commentary on the election to their online fans, all while bypassing the traditional press.
Joe Biden, 81, was serenaded on camera the deliciously embarrassing TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders got stumped by Kamala Harris in a Twitch stream co-hosted by a cat boy anime VTuber. Donald Trump collaborated with the quintessential creator brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of spending time on traditional mainstream press interviews, Harris and Trump relied on creators to galvanize votes and spread their campaign messages.
“There is simply no value—relative to my colleagues in the mainstream press—in a general election to talk to The New York Times or The Washington Post, because those (readers) are already with us,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager . Harris manager, he told Semafor in December.
The influence has become a 250 billion dollar industry. More than 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they follow an influencer on social media, a Pew Research survey found last year. A more recent survey, published in novemberfound that one in five American adults receive news from news influencers. That shift in media consumption was met with record spending on creator partnerships. Priorities USA invested at least $1 million in influencer marketing. The Harris campaign paid at least 2.5 million dollars to management agencies that hire creators for political advertising campaigns.
This election, creators were everywhere: the Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, rallies, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations for this takeover of political messages by creators were laid almost a decade ago. In 2016, Trump demonstrated how social media platforms like Twitter could influence voters. Throughout the 2020 election, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on a presidential campaign which recruited influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates, and the Biden administration routinely invited creators to the White House for briefings.
By embracing creators, politicians have begun to blur the line between talking heads and journalists. Unlike reporters, newsmakers are often not subject to editorial standards or substantial fact-checking, something that is one high-profile defamation lawsuit away from changing but, for now, makes a difference. Many creators work in a similar way to what journalists do: absorb, translate and communicate news to online audiences. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them seem more fanatical than objective observers. Some are explicitly party activists. Still, they are often provided access similar to that obtained by the traditional press.