The first thing many people do upon waking up is check their phones to see what’s going on in the world.
Whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, X or even Facebook, social media is a huge part of modern everyday life. Many people’s lives revolve around it, and it serves as their main place to get information. But this year it played maybe the biggest role in our country since its inception.
The election between Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump wasn’t typical, with messages conveyed mostly through campaigns, news stories and commercials. More than any previous election, it was driven through social media.
“‘Swing voters’ — defined here as those who did not rule out voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris from the start of the campaign — largely got their news from social media,” according to polling by the website Navigator. “Leading up to the election, 45 percent of ‘swing voters’ and 52 percent of new Trump voters cited getting their news through social media, a far greater share than the national electorate (37 percent).”
The reach of social media’s influence would not be possible without the main platforms’ current number of users. As of April 2024, Facebook is the most popular social media platform, averaging around 3 billion monthly users worldwide, according to the Paris Junior College in Texas. Instagram, TikTok, and X also have impressive userbases.
Social media history didn’t start in 2024, but this election was the first where people had unfiltered and unrestricted media access, worldwide and in the United States.
In the 2016 election, social media was used significantly less. Facebook was still the most popular platform, according to Justin Powell Web, but it had just over half as many monthly users, the same true for Instagram and X (then Twitter). Meanwhile, the giant that has become TikTok didn’t even exist.
Social media wasn’t as popular in 2020 either, but with more societal restrictions during the pandemic, the media’s role proved smaller than in this year.
According to Target Internet, in 2020, Facebook had 2.5 billion monthly users, one-sixth less than today’s amount. X, TikTok, and Instagram had just half the monthly users in 2020 than in 2024. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people couldn’t be together, making media much harder to produce and harder for candidates to take advantage of.
The amount of users in previous election years, combined with 2020’s pandemic, makes social media seem like a dwarf in comparison to today.
Beyond the role social media plays in people’s lives making it so influential this election, the way the two candidates used it proved to be a factor.
Harris and Trump had two very different approaches in the media during this election. Harris was looking for celebrity supporters to help spread her campaign across the country. Trump, on the other hand, used members of the media as his way of spreading his campaign. This is one of the reasons he won this election.
There is a saying in the sports world: playing to win versus playing to not lose. In this election, Trump played to win and Harris played to not lose.
Trump recognized the trends that social media had and used that to his advantage. He went on the no. 1 podcast in the country, The Joe Rogan Experience, and drew attention to himself for the election. Harris was offered the same opportunity, according to Rogan, but her team refused the opportunity.
According to Navigator exit polls, “One in five new Trump voters said podcasts alone were a main news source (21 percent) compared to just 12 percent of base Harris voters and 14 percent of the overall electorate.”
Trump also partnered with people like Elon Musk, the CEO of X, Adin Ross, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, and Dana White, the CEO of one of the fastest rising sports, the UFC.
Not only did he have influence from those people, but he also gained popularity through his own acts, and allowed those things to spread on their own through the media.
One example is from when he went to work in a McDonald’s one day, resulting in memes and pictures trending on all kinds of platforms. Another is from his assassination attempt when, after he was shot in the ear, he jumped up from the ground and put his fist into the air, resulting in his name and picture trending for weeks once again.
It didn’t end there, however: Trump made as many public appearances as he could to get his name across every platform there is. He appeared in NFL games, UFC events, and more just to draw as much attention to himself as possible.
Trump made himself more relatable with all his appearances, trying to show the people who he is. Harris, on the other hand, attempted appearances in media, but none of them were relatable for her audience.
Harris did appear on the Howard Stern Show, which may have gained her points, but the show doesn’t have the reach or influence Rogan’s podcast does for users of social media.
She also was claimed to be faking “door-knocking videos” where she would go up to people’s doors and talk to voters personally. Videos leaked of her allegedly talking to people before recording her video, asking the family to go back inside so she could knock on their door and do the video. This claim caused a spiral for Harris in the media and made all of her media attempts after that seem illegitimate to people.
Trump and Harris both played the game, but only one of them played it to win. Social media will only continue to grow, and so will its influence on people’s lives and the world alongside it. This election is the biggest piece of evidence proving that.
Velocity 
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