Photo courtesy of Free Malaysia Today
After Donald Trump was temporarily banned by numerous social media platforms, he went on to create his own social media platform, Truth Social.
By Angelina Godinez ’28
Staff Writer
The influence of social media and internet fads on political campaigns has become incredibly concerning. As politicians and campaign leaders focus more on algorithms, trendy audios and clickbait, they support a pandemic of misinformation and naivety. Despite its convenience and instantaneous ability to mobilize users toward advocacy and political participation, the use of social media in politics shifts its overall focus from diplomacy to performance, a change that negatively impacts our nation overall.
The use of social media in politics and campaigns has skyrocketed during the 2024 elections. This has become extremely visible in Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, as she attempts to appeal to younger voters through the use of social media, humor and popular celebrity endorsements.
For instance, one of the largest booms in popularity following her stepping up to presidential candidacy was the trend with her “coconut” speech. In recalling a story about how her mother would rhetorically claim people thought they “just fell out of a coconut tree,” she began laughing between phrases which sparked Gen Z’s interest in this speech. The speech reads, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” People found her contagious laugh between words humorous and began using the audio to make videos and create memes and harmless posts endorsing her candidacy. The spike in popularity of this speech led to some claiming Harris’ rise to presidency as the “Operation Coconut Tree.” This marked the beginning of Harris’ media uprising and path to candidacy.
Similarly, quickly following the drop of Charli XCX’s sixth studio album “BRAT”, she posted a tweet in favor of Harris and her candidacy claiming, “[K]amala IS brat.” This skyrocketed Harris’s popularity and she even “rebranded” her campaign to fit the aesthetic of Charli XCX’s album art with a neon green background and infamous font reading “Kamala HQ.” Fans across the nation rushed to create memes and even merchandise of the unofficial Harris/Brat collaboration and participation in “brat summer.” Harris’ relevancy and appeal to younger generations and millions of Charli XCX’s fans brought plenty of “talk talk” to her campaign and voter support. Harris became viewed as an icon and representation for young women with concerns about their freedom, and, through trends, became “one of your girls.”
Further, Harris’ team has also mobilized TikTok to her advantage and her campaign continues to gain popularity through the use of trending sounds and songs from various artists such as Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, along with performances and endorsements from artists such as Megan Thee Stallion, Lil John, Bon Iver, John Legend, Stevie Wonder, The Chicks and many more.
Although people seem to be particularly critical of Harris’ social media usage, the former president, Donald Trump, is far from digitally inactive. Former President Trump is notorious for having a strong political presence on social media. In fact, it was social media which made it possible for former President Trump to coerce his followers into believing in the supposed corruption and stealing of the election following his loss against current U.S. President Joe Biden, a move which has prompted lawsuits accusing him of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. This led to Trump being temporarily banned on various social media platforms like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and X, after which he created his own social media platform, TRUTH Social. Although it is not the first social media platform created with the far right in mind, TRUTH Social allows radical Republicans to openly share their opinions and opposition to the Democratic Party with little to no restrictions.
This increasing use of social media and online resources on both sides doesn’t come without a cost. According to Newsweek, “Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign has spent $54.7 million with Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company, in the past three months … [during which] the Harris campaign placed 36,805 ads … During the same time period, former President Donald Trump's campaign spent just $6 million with Meta and ran 5,492 ads on the social media platform. Opinion polls have shown them running almost neck and neck.”
Thus, despite Harris’ spending, the race for president is still anyone’s game. Mount Holyoke College Associate Professor of Politics Ali Aslam, a political theory specialist, backed this up in an interview with Mount Holyoke News, stating, “Harris’ content is at the same level as any other key social media player. They have to fight for attention in the same ways and break through our routinized habits of distracted scrolling.”
The presence of politics on social media stems largely from society’s dependency and alarmingly increasing usage of social media. We have dug our own grave and will only continue to plummet into a society filled with “fake news” and political propaganda, with an ever-increasing presence of politicians, as shown by the actions of both the Harris and Trump campaigns. There is no longer a separation between what is real and fake, what is entertainment and what is political. As Aslam stated, “Social media and for-profit media makes no differentiation between political content and other forms of entertainment. They're all the same. And I think that that’s to our collective detriment, that we can no longer discern one from the other,”
In the words of Aslam, “just as anime has its fans, there are fans of political drama, real life political drama.”
Political debates shift into “what character is best,” and policies become less of a concern for our future and more of a judgment of character. Our candidates are no longer human, and instead they morph into characters created for entertainment. In this light, the world of politics and the very future of democracy begins to mutate from a serious and sensitive topic into a comedy. Voters focus more on who “performs better” when struggling to identify the lesser of “two evils” in modern day politics. What was once political becomes, as stated by Aslam, “a kind of theater, like, ‘Oh, what did Mitch McConnell say or do to whoever,’ that we just kind of take in, as I said before, a form of another kind of entertainment.”
As long as the presence of politics on social media continues, our democracy will continue to corrode into a game of “who said what,” and abandon the question, “Who values what?”
Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.