Dr. Michael A. Beam
Associate Professor and director of the School of Emerging Media and Technology at Kent State University.
Email: mbeam6@kent.edu
Dr. Myiah J. Hutchens
Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida.
Email: myiahhutchens@ufl.edu
Dr. Jay D. Hmielowski
Associate Professor in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida.
Email: jhmielowski@ufl.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)
The proliferation of new social media platforms in 2024 set this U.S. general election apart from recent campaigns. Previously, a small number of platforms dominated the information ecosystem (e.g., Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X)). More platforms now attract attention across different citizen groups, resulting in changes in political communication and affecting how campaigns make strategic communication decisions.
The shift in the social media landscape can be traced to decisions by social media companies in the wake of the 2020 election. Trump’s rejection of his 2020 election defeat and communication connected to the insurrection on January 6, 2021, resulted in online platforms including Facebook and Twitter banning Trump. Even technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple refused to host the niche right-wing social media platform Parler after Trump’s move there. Trump launched a hyper-partisan social media platform, Truth Social, in 2022, providing him spotlight and distribution. Despite Truth Social’s small user base, Trump’s messages were amplified by journalists, pundits, and supporters across other online platforms and media. Even after many platforms allowed Trump to rejoin, Truth Social remained central to communication for his campaign.
Trump’s deplatforming was one catalyst for the fragmentation of new online platforms, but changes to the previously dominant platforms also motivated the shift. For example, Meta willingly relinquished its concentrated power in online news and politics in 2024 after three increasingly divisive general election campaigns coincided with increasing distrust of Facebook. Meta dismantled their trust and safety team, sunsetted CrowdTangle – a data sharing technology used by researchers and journalists, and demoted news and politics in their newsfeeds. This deemphasis of news meant that Meta platforms, especially Facebook, were less central to politics than we’ve seen in more than a decade.
Similarly, X’s (formerly Twitter) role in the 2024 election significantly changed compared to prior election cycles. Twitter always had fewer users than Facebook, but it’s prominence in U.S. elections was due to two main factors: elite use and data accessibility. Twitter was the preferred platform of many politicians, journalists, and political researchers in the 2008-2020 campaigns. This was best illustrated by Donald Trump’s prolific use of the platform in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. However, Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase and subsequent changes to the platform resulted in an exodus of users. Musk dismantled the trust and safety team, espoused and amplified conservative messages, and made data access for research prohibitively expensive. Many journalists, academics, and left-leaning activists abandoned the platform, making it less central to newsmaking than in previous elections. Simultaneously, content on X tacked rightward.
As a whole, these events and platform decisions have led partisans to gravitate to platforms with like-minded users. New platforms have tended to draw ideologically homogenous audiences: Parler, Gab, Rumbl, and Truth Social served as social media spaces preferred by conservative-leaning individuals, while Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads drew more liberal-leaning audiences.
Platform fragmentation also resulted in changes relative to media distribution, consumption, and political power compared to the 2008-2020 elections. For example, communication became less centralized. Social media influencers that are not part of the mainstream media have grown audiences that span across platforms, making their content an important place for political campaigns to focus their message distribution. Moreover, algorithmic recommendations gained power with the proliferation of TikTok and short-form video content on copycat platforms. This shift represents perhaps the biggest change in online political content consumption. Instead of the algorithm showing users content from friends and family who may hold divergent views on topics, the opaque recommendation algorithms on these platforms provide content based on previous viewing behaviors, which may decrease the likelihood of seeing opposing information.
Another important shift away from dominant online platforms has been the explosion of interest in podcasts. While podcasting technology has existed for over two decades, the ascendent popularity of streaming platforms has allowed for long-form content like podcasts to flourish. This format is especially attractive as it can be cheaply produced and easily packaged into short-form videos.
The shift away from large dominant online platforms to a fragmented environment dominated by influencers and podcasts has resulted in campaigns rethinking their media strategies during the 2024 election. In addition to social media communication, campaigns historically relied on traditional mainstream media coverage such as interviews with mainstream news outlets. However, during 2024 the candidates spent notable time interviewing with prominent podcasters like Joe Rogan (Trump) and Alex Cooper (Harris), while fewer interviews were granted to mainstream media outlets.
The fragmentation of the online political information ecosystem, including social media platforms, led to tactical campaign innovation, setting it apart from previous election cycles. Individual media platforms and channels ceded power to influencers and podcast producers who operate across platforms. Trump’s 2024 victory might suggest that his heightened use of these new platforms and distribution methods is a winning strategy. However, these changes came alongside other prominent factors including eroding trust in institutions, economic inflation, Biden’s belated rejection of the Democratic nomination, and unprecedented campaign spending. These dynamics will likely have downstream effects in political communication including how we understand audiences, polarization, effective messaging, political norms, and political behaviors.