Video Killed the Social Media Star

The two 2024 Presidential Debates have proven the continued centrality of television to our electoral system. Despite all of the hype around digital campaigns conducted on social media, television still moves the needle. This is in part the result of Boomer Ballast — but not entirely.

The Trump-Biden debate is one of the most important media events in American political history. No amount of social media posting could achieve the coordination that ensued from this two-hour event and resulted in the epochal decision by Biden to step aside from the race.

The second debate provided answers to just “who Kamala Harris is” — and that she can “hold her own against Donald Trump.” Thousands of memes and outrages have come and gone since her nomination, none of them remembered like this debate will be. Now, that’s not really who Kamala Harris “is”—it is obviously fake, in fact. But it is fake in a way that we can all recognize, from having been trained to understand the logic of television. It is really fake, a genuine performance of the broadcast video art form.

It’s real in the way that professional wrestling and reality TV is real. And it’s real in a way that today's increasingly fragmented social media is not. Television is intersubjectively real: we all know that we all know that we saw the same thing. We all occupied the same point of view: that of the TV camera. On social media, we can only experience politics through a whirlpool of different points of view. Social media is an echo chamber, but a cacophonous one, where we cannot even hear ourselves think, let alone deliberate or reach consensus.

To be clear, television is far from the ideal deliberative media technology. The TV camera presents politics from the point of view of entertainment, as an intellectually barren exchange of soundbites. But this is, at least, a *single point of view*. We can see the two politicians, physically and temporally contiguous. Most importantly, we know that *everyone else* is seeing the same thing.

Social media is not without advantages. The furious gyrations of the feedback loops at the core of social media allow politicians to test out campaign slogans and even just observe what trends are popular in order to mirror them back. “Kamala is Brat” is not a political position—it’s a briefly compelling but ultimately arbitrary fixed point of attention, a shared point of view among some subset of users.

These arbitrary outputs of the social media whirlpool are revealed to be ridiculous in the fixed gaze of the television camera. Trump, flustered, confused the debate with one of his rallies and began talking about immigrants “eating the dogs and cats” in Ohio. While unusually grotesque, this is not unrepresentative of the sort of meaningless meme produced by social media. If Harris had said “Kamala is Brat” during the debate, it would be have been structurally the same as the thing about the pets — cringe, rather than racist, but no less arbitrary.

(This post is more social media than it is TV, forgive the clickbait meme-image.)

The social science of social media is far from settled. Is this the inevitable trajectory of social media, from enabling consensus to driving fragmentation? Did the creeping increase of algorithmic recommendation — rather than old-school chronological feeds — cause this phase shift? Has the strategic use of misinformation and hyper-polarizing tactics by adversarial actors foreign and domestic pulled us into this new equilibrium of distrust?

My preferred answer is to look at the users, as in my recent book The YouTube Apparatus. Social media is social, is my theoretical mantra. Early adopters tend to have a lot in common—and it was this shared orientation to the world, more cultural than political, that served as an unseen substrate for coordination. Note that the most successful online political campaigns have tended to be about the internet.

It’s very difficult as an individual user to know how the population of users on a given platform is changing, particularly on social media platforms built on top of real-world social networks. You might not think much of your grandma and grandpa on Facebook—but when everyone’s grandma and grandpa join, it changes the dynamics of information circulation.

The case of X is the clearest example because the change in the userbase has been so stark. Until Musk put his thumb on the scales, the platform repeatedly spit out arbitrary progressive memes -- and we’ve been able to see the valence switch on the scale of months, as Max Read notes. Now, the platform is optimized for surfacing arbitrary right-wing memes.

Regardless of their politics, most X users and especially super-users are simply trolls, people alienated from mainstream society deriving some facsimile of community by promulgating whatever memes will get them the most likes that day. This “reserve army of the unverified” has no fixed or even shared point of view — and they are anti-political, as such.

Politics based on ideology involves political leaders proposing some unified vision of how the world should be, and how we might get there. Television can communicate only a very shallow ideology—but at least it’s something, some finger-painted picture of the way we want society to be.

A politics based on social media is instead anti-ideological; rather than leaders, it rewards reactionary vibe-surfers attuned to the arbitrary whims of users amplified by platform architectures. The longer the social media whirlpool spins, the more people become alienated from the entire self-reinforcing enterprise—and the more vertiginous the gyre for those that remain.