Kamala vs the crazies

Kamala Harris’s nomination has energised the Democratic Party’s social media game in a way that we have not seen since Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Her campaign’s TikTok account boasts over 4mn followers, engaging younger voters with viral content. At the same time on X, the Harris campaign account is steadily trolling her Republican rival on a daily basis.X, when it was Twitter, used to be Trump’s ace in the social media game, where “the Don” is now clearly slipping. Stock prices for his own vanity platform, Truth Social fell to a new low last week, which dovetails with the social media outlet’s steady decline in users this year.Trump created Truth Social after being kicked off Twitter, for inciting the violence that occurred at the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, while the US Congress was trying to certify the 2020 presidential election results. Although his political ally Elon Musk acquired Twitter, changed its name to X, and restored Trump’s account, he is bound by an agreement with his own company to post any campaign-related announcements first on Truth Social.The lagging performance of Trump’s media business and social media campaigning comes while the broader political landscape is shifting away from him. Democrats have surprisingly rallied around Harris, in a way that did not occur during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run for the presidency.At the same time, some Republicans, such as US Senator Mitt Romney, have begun distancing themselves from Trump’s wholly unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Others, such as former US representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have gone as far as formally endorsing his Democratic challenger, Harris. Last week, Dick Cheney also announced that he will vote for Harris. From the Republican point of view, this is a stunning dispatch from a staunch conservative who served as VP to George W Bush.But will any of this make a difference to the 2024 election results? The doubt arises because in many other ways, politics on social media during this campaign season looks a lot like it did in 2016, with a profusion of disinformation from right-wing political influencers.Recently, far-right operatives have falsely claimed that an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado had been overrun by a Venezuelan gang. Fox News bolstered these claims on its cable network, along with Musk, while Trump has been citing the false info in campaign speeches. Together, they are creating an echo-chamber of disinformation, intended to inflame fears about illegal immigration in US.Research on social media and politics has graphically demonstrated the power of these networks of disinformation online. As groups share the same themes and messages on social media (even when it’s based on unsubstantiated or misleading information), it tends to amalgamate on partisan media outlets and within extremist political rhetoric, reifying its believability.What makes this kind of disinformation even more vexing is that it plays heavily into the emotions of fear and anger. My own most recent research on digital politics in an age of digital emotion, examined the content of political posts on X for clues as to why certain ones resonated with followers. What my co-author and I learned is that rhetorical strategies employed by Trump and far-right influencers since 2016 rely on the power of emotion and hyperbole in crafting their political and cultural narratives. And they do so with great effect, compared to more reasoned forms of discourse.The political left often tends to try to counter misinformation and hyperbolic rhetoric with expertise, facts, context, and nuance. However, this approach alone simply does not work, especially within the current US political climate in which social media users have hardened ideological views.Since deriding news media as “the enemy of the people”, Trump has primed his followers to distrust experts, journalists and others. Personal beliefs and emotions expressed in short soundbites and memes are more likely to resonate with voters on the political right.One lesson that Democrats and the Harris campaign can take from our study is that the most effective social media influencers use a range of rhetorical strategies to make a single point, including emotional language and humour, in addition to rational evidence and logic. So far, the Harris campaign seems to have embraced this approach, especially in its use of humour and ridicule, which are powerful emotive devices.Social media will not determine the outcome of the 2024 election, but it will shape the American public’s perception of the result. If the popular vote and electoral college results are decided by a narrow margin in Harris’s favour, it will be easier for Trump’s predetermined claims of election interference to resonate. And this will help the idea that the vote was somehow “rigged” against him, to take hold among the political right. However, if Harris can win by a large margin, it is less likely that rank and file Republicans will follow along and support Trump’s assertions of voter fraud. The writer is an independent journalist and professor, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati.