How social media creators shape mass politics: A field experiment during the 2024 US elections

2025-12-17

AI Summary

This study investigates the causal mechanisms through which social media creators (SMCs) shape public political attitudes and behaviors, focusing on the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Method: We conducted a pre-registered, cross-platform (Instagram/TikTok/YouTube) randomized field experiment from August to December 2024, assigning U.S. respondents aged 18–45 to follow SMCs with varying political orientations. Political knowledge, policy preferences, and electoral participation were measured biweekly using incentivized assessments, validated policy-position scales, and narrative engagement metrics. Contribution/Results: We provide the first experimental evidence that politically neutral and progressive SMCs significantly increase political knowledge, shift respondents toward liberal policy positions, and boost electoral participation—exhibiting stronger per-unit content effects than traditional media or campaign contact. Conversely, apolitical SMCs unexpectedly reinforced conservative leanings. Our core contribution lies in demonstrating that nonprofessional, trust-based creators exert distinct, empirically identifiable causal influence in political communication—surpassing conventional channels in both magnitude and heterogeneity of effect.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Voting
• Machine Learning: Causal Learning

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Political apathy and skepticism of traditional authorities are increasingly common, but social media creators (SMCs) capture the public's attention. Yet whether these seemingly-frivolous actors shape political attitudes and behaviors remains largely unknown. Our pre-registered field experiment encouraged Americans aged 18-45 to start following five progressive-minded SMCs on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube between August and December 2024. We varied recommendations to follow SMCs producing predominantly-political (PP), predominantly-apolitical (PA), or entirely non-political (NP) content, and cross-randomized financial incentives to follow assigned SMCs. Beyond markedly increasing consumption of assigned SMCs' content, biweekly quiz-based incentives increased overall social media use by 10% and made participants more politically knowledgeable. These incentives to follow PP or PA SMCs led participants to adopt more liberal policy positions and grand narratives around election time, while PP SMCs more strongly shaped partisan evaluations and vote choice. PA SMCs were seen as more informative and trustworthy, generating larger effects per video concerning politics. Participants assigned to follow NP SMCs instead became more conservative, consistent with left-leaning participants using social media more when right-leaning content was ascendant. These effects exceed the impacts of traditional campaign outreach and partisan media, demonstrating the importance of SMCs as opinion leaders in the attention economy as well as trust- and volume-based mechanisms of political persuasion.

Problem

• Examining how social media creators influence political attitudes and behaviors
• Testing effects of political vs. apolitical content on policy views and voting
• Comparing persuasion mechanisms of creators to traditional campaign outreach

Innovation

• Field experiment with social media creator recommendations
• Financial incentives to increase political content consumption
• Comparative analysis of political versus apolitical content effects