Following the U.S. election, Slate writer Scaachi Koul says some of the buzzier pop culture moments of the U.S. election campaign — like singer Charli XCX’s post describing Kamala Harris as “brat” — didn’t seem to impact the results. 

“Overwhelmingly, the cultural moments we thought mattered didn’t,” she said while speaking with CBC’s Commotion. 

“I thought it was cute when Kamala and Charli XCX were doing this brat thing. Yeah, I can laugh about it, but it didn’t matter.”

But, Koul says it’s likely too soon to tell whether endorsements from celebrities like Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Beyoncé ultimately swung votes one way or the other.

“We don’t know enough yet about why people voted the way they voted to be able to say anything about this yet.”  

Speaking on the same episode, culture critic Pablo The Don said people are following what they perceive as being authentic.

“I think the random person who has consistent viral tweets on Twitter might have more power than Beyoncé in swinging elections at this point,” they said.

Harder to sell voting on social media

Columbia University political science professor Donald Green told CBC News it’s unlikely that social media was terribly effective in getting out the vote. 

“I should differentiate between social media blasts by influencers on the one hand and friend-to-friend communication by people who are in the same social network,” Green said.

“The latter tends to work and the former is ambiguous, but probably does not, and social media advertising almost certainly does not work,” he said, noting that it’s easier for celebrities to sell you something than it is for them to get you to vote.

“It’s a thing that you can sort of do right then and there, whereas voting tends to roll out slowly over time.” 

Green also noted that the typical social media audience is younger, “and that’s an audience that, if it turned out in greater numbers, would have put Harris over the top.”

An exit poll from Edison Research cited by Reuters had Harris winning the support of 55 per cent of voters aged 18-29, compared to 42 per cent for Donald Trump.

Green says there was an initial three to four week honeymoon period for Harris, but after that, support for both candidates seemed to remain static.

“They had almost exactly the same polling numbers from the debate on.” 

He says it seems to him as though the election outcome “is due to widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, rightly or wrongly, and a kind of sense that the country’s on the wrong track.”

Influencing the algorithm

Wael Jabr, assistant professor in the Supply Chain and Information Systems department at Pennsylvania State University, says people are more likely to be influenced by a message the more they hear it, and that means campaigns value social media influencers. 

“We rarely click on ads … So they realize that this is not how you influence your feed,” he said. “You pay influencers not a lot of money and you have a stronger impact than ads.”

One of the biggest influencers of all, Elon Musk, is a Trump supporter who owns the social media platform X. Jabr says he thinks Musk’s posts on X were influential. 

“I think what’s useful is, he tweets a lot, and he has a large follower base,” he said. “So now you’re creating a lot of volume in the platform and therefore influencing this algorithm.”

A changing information ecosystem

Meanwhile, Green says if there’s anything that can be taken away from this election concerning social media, it has to do with how the information ecosystem has changed over the decades.

“One of the more remarkable things about this election is that though saddled with a string of scandals, Trump didn’t really suffer a setback,” he said. “His stalwart supporters came out for him and they never really wavered.”

Green believes that has to do with the way social media shows people content that they’ve already engaged with in some way. 

“The network of support systems that would keep people sustained in their commitment to Trump exists now in a way that wouldn’t have been true 40 to 50 years ago.”