In 2016, when Americans elected Donald Trump president, it was common speculation that many voters didn’t know what they had gotten themselves into. After a tumultuous presidency featuring two impeachments, an attempted coup, a civil suit for sexual assault and conviction on 34 felony charges stemming from an affair with a pornographic actress, it’s safe to say that Americans know who Trump really is. This makes the United States 2024 election all the more shocking. Given a choice between the status quo and the promise of chaos, Americans resoundingly chose chaos.
Eight years ago, scholars of social media worried that the digital public sphere had become a vector for misinformation, misleading voters in the UK about Brexit and in the US about Trump and his rival, Hillary Clinton. There were reasons to worry. An organised disinformation campaign engineered by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg targeted longstanding divides in American society, while fake news designed to generate ad clicks, mass produced by university students in North Macedonia, targeted the gullibility of Trump supporters.
A cottage industry of disinformation studies sprang up, unpacking lessons learned in 2016 and exposing the failures of platforms like Facebook to limit the spread of disinformation. Duly chastened, platforms built out their “trust and safety” teams in time to respond to the spread of Covid misinformation, blocking dubious health advice and deplatforming anti-vaccine advocates. This led to a political backlash, as many vaccine sceptics aligned themselves with Trump and saw the attempts to protect public health as political censorship.
Concerns about political censorship of social media expanded as Trump’s 2020 campaign alleged widespread voter fraud, something not supported by evidence through years of investigations. But a sensitivity over disinformation may have led platforms to be overzealous, limiting online discussion of allegations against Joe Biden’s son Hunter, accused of corruption in his dealings with a Ukrainian oil company. Asked about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, vice president-elect JD Vance pointed to “censorship” of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop as swaying the 2020 election against Trump.
In the lead up to 2024, platforms which had terminated Trump’s accounts and aggressively fought misinformation have been far less proactive. Mark Zuckerberg has told Republican leaders that he was pressured by the Biden administration to take down Covid-19 content and now regrets his decisions to comply with those demands. In 2023, YouTube said it would no longer block false claims about the 2020 election. And Twitter? Under Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of Trump’s most generous donors, X has invited disinformation spreaders back on the platform and used its algorithms and Musk’s personal account to share conspiracy theories and dehumanising attacks on immigrants and minorities.
In 2016, social media platforms were surprised by misinformation and disinformation. In 2020, they aggressively fought to limit it. In 2024, disinformation is a feature not a bug.
Convinced that limiting partisan disinformation is a losing game, platforms are now seeing the benefits of hosting highly partisan conversations. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump and featured the returning president in a rambling three-hour podcast interview, is one of the best-paid content providers on Spotify, which renewed a reported $250m non-exclusive contract with the right-leaning voice of the “manosphere”.
As media watchers unpack the 2024 elections, podcasts look indicative of the social media moment. Younger voters have grown up spending hours with YouTube influencers and opinionated podcasters. Both Trump and Harris made time for podcasters, prioritising these appearances over traditional television appearances with political reporters. It’s likely that Trump’s meandering “weave”, in which he switches topics without apparent structure or plan, plays better in the podcast format than Harris’s more disciplined talking points.
It has always been possible to isolate oneself in an ideological bubble, reading or watching only familiar and comfortable media. Debates about the role of platforms in protecting us from misinformation have rarely extended to the more complex question of whether we should demand diversity, ideological or otherwise, in our social media. We will hear arguments that Trump was elected by politically disengaged young men, who he welcomed into his movement by stepping into their echo chamber.
I suspect we think too much about digital media as a channel for delivering messages from candidates to voters, and not enough about digital media as a space for social listening. The Democratic Party’s stunning failure in 2024 is a failure to listen: to voters who had no enthusiasm for a second Biden term, to those who wanted a primary vote rather than a coronation, to millions so economically stressed by rising housing and food prices that they chose a candidate who made more believable promises of change.
Listening at scale is one of the core challenges of a democracy. Listening to the constituents motivated and competent enough to reach directly to a representative gives a biased sample of concerns. Mechanisms from public meetings to polling to petitions offer limited channels for feedback and opinion. But listening to social media at scale offers the possibility of understanding shifts in national mood that may be consequential if difficult to articulate.
Because Trump never stops talking, it’s hard to think of him as a good listener. But by being terminally online, he may be listening at scale in a way that Harris and the Democrats have yet to master. In his comfortable bubble on Truth Social, Trump workshops his material, receiving quantitative feedback from his devoted followers on what resonates and what falls flat. His online writing and his rallies are a kind of A/B testing, seeing what lines of attack succeed and which fall flat. It’s a limited form of social listening. And it may be much more than Democrats have been doing, failing to hear that voters were at least as scared of prosperity slipping away as they were the threats of losing a functioning democracy.
