Dr. Daniel Lane
Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. His research and teaching explore how individuals and groups use communication technology to create social and political change. His recent work focuses on how technologies like social media shape political inequality.
Email: dlane@ucsb.edu
Dr. Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey
Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. Through his research, teaching, and comedy performance, he investigates the role of humor, entertainment, and creativity in shaping how we imagine and enact our citizenship. He is currently exploring these questions with a comparative lens between the US and India.
Email: kanupandey@ucsb.edu
U.S. Election 2024
64. Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content (Dr Jessica Baldwin-Philippi)
65. From platform politics to partisan platforms (Prof Philip M. Napoli, Talia Goodman)
66. The fragmented social media landscape in the 2024 U.S. election (Dr Michael A. Beam, Dr Myiah J. Hutchens, Dr Jay D. Hmielowski)
67. Outside organization advertising on Meta platforms: Coordination and duplicity (Prof Jennifer Stromer-Galley)
68. Prejudice and priming in the online political sphere (Prof Richard Perloff)
69. Perceptions of social media in the 2024 presidential election (Dr Daniel Lane, Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey)
70. Modeling public Facebook comments on the attempted assassination of President Trump (Dr Justin Phillips, Prof Andrea Carson)
71. The memes of production: Grassroots-made digital content and the presidential campaign (Dr Rosalynd Southern, Dr Caroline Leicht)
72. The gendered dynamics of presidential campaign tweets in 2024 (Prof Heather K. Evans, Dr Jennifer Hayes Clark)
73. Threads and TikTok adoption among 2024 congressional candidates in battleground states (Prof Terri L. Towner, Prof Caroline Muñoz)
74. Who would extraterrestrials side with if they were watching us on social media? (Taewoo Kang, Prof Kjerstin Thorson)
75. AI and voter suppression in the 2024 election (Prof Diana Owen)
76. News from AI: ChatGPT and political information (Dr Caroline Leicht, Dr Peter Finn, Dr Lauren C. Bell, Dr Amy Tatum)
77. Analyzing the perceived humanness of AI-generated social media content around the presidential debate (Dr Tiago Ventura, Rebecca Ansell, Dr Sejin Paik, Autumn Toney, Prof Leticia Bode, Prof Lisa Singh)
Every presidential election has its own popular narrative about the role of technology in politics. In 1960, it was the power of Television in the Kennedy vs. Nixon Debate. In 2008, it was the Obama campaign’s innovative use of Facebook. In 2024, algorithmic social media (e.g., TikTok, Instagram) emerged as key technologies in the contest between Trump and Harris. The most obvious episode of this came in the form of the “Brat Summer” phenomenon, in which TikTok culture surrounding the singer Charlie XCX was breathlessly remixed to anoint Kamala Harris as culturally cool (i.e., “brat”). As “Brat” Summer turned into Fall, the tone of social media turned from jubilance to darker themes related to consequences of the election. More broadly, social media have been framed as either exciting spaces for building political solidarity or channels for misinformation and outrage.
Given the fraught history of social media’s role in U.S. politics, we wanted to better understand how Americans with different political and social identities viewed the role of social media in politics in the days before the election. Previous studies suggests that people have very different perceptions of the role of social media, depending on the groups they belong to. In turn, these perceptions can drive political behavior and can shape peoples’ relationships with politics.
To examine these questions, we conducted a survey of 2,500 American social media users during the Fall of 2024. Three initial findings are helpful in characterizing how Americans were thinking about social media during the election.
1. Overall, social media was viewed as a useful, but exhausting context for politics, with significant potential for harm. Majorities of respondents in our survey viewed social media as at least “moderately” personally useful for learning about politics and expressing their political opinions. Yet, exhaustion was the most frequent emotion expressed, particularly among Democrats and women. In addition, nearly half of respondents perceived social media as negative for America in general. This highlights the complex reality that many Americans rely upon social media to engage in politics, while at the same time perceiving these environments as exhausting and harmful/ineffective.
2. Democrats and Black Americans were the most optimistic about the role of social media. Our data show that across partisan and racial/ethnic groups, Democrats and Black Americans stand out as perceiving social media as a more positive force in American politics compared to other groups. This may reflect the unique nature of Kamala Harris’s viral campaign presence, but also is further evidence of long-standing enthusiasm among liberals and marginalized groups for social media as contexts for positive social change.
3. Americans with stronger social and political identities saw social media differently. Across a range of measures, those who more strongly identified with their political party felt more positive emotions when they saw politics on social media and viewed social media as more positive (and less negative) for their own groups. In some cases, these dedicated group members also viewed social media as less harmful for other groups. For example, respondents who strongly identified as white perceived social media as less negative for racial minorities. This pattern of findings highlights that people are likely processing their experiences of social media through lens of their identities. Overall, our data paint a complex portrait of American’s perceptions of social media. These technologies are seen as both valuable and harmful, evoking feelings of hope, anger, and exhaustion. Experiences vary across some of the most important sociopolitical identities in the American politics and likely shape how different groups engage in politics. Given the outcome of the election, some critical reflection about the role of social media is in order. Did emotional reactions to politics on social media inhibit or motivate further political action? Why do people have such different perceptions of social media and what are the consequences in terms of how Americans think about regulation and moderation of social media platforms? Was optimism about social media among certain groups productive or misplaced? As a new political reality sets in, questions like these will be newly posed about the role of technology in shaping the outcome of another American election and the way people imagine politics moving forward.