Monday, December 11, 2023

MEDIA = THE MESSAGE: Make no mistake about it: 2024 will be America's first "TikTok Election."

Just happened to find this piece while doing the daily drudgery of finding news:

And in case you're wondering—that's a very bad thing.

TikTok is body-shaming the U.S. economy, driving down consumer confidence with a skewed narrative that could have far-reaching political impacts in 2024 and beyond.

Like the young, fit woman with a healthy BMI who ends up watching too many videos of rail-thin super models only to eventually begin to see herself as overweight, TikTok is enabling "vibes" of economic gloom and doom to take hold, even when the data says otherwise.
And it's having a real impact on the way many Americans view President Joe Biden's job performance.

It's this TikTok economic body-shaming that explains how Biden, despite chalking up an enviable spate of economic achievements, including record low unemployment, real wage growth, and GDP expansion—feats all accomplished despite an environment of rising interests rates—is trailing former President Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, in poll after poll.
Although Biden inherited a rocky post-COVID economy that was teetering on the brink of a recession, Biden has been able to guide it to terra firma; but as Sam Sutton posited in a recent piece for POLITICO, "a so-called soft landing might not mean a lick to voters."
But what is it about the dynamics of this economy that has voters blaming an administration that has done just about everything it was supposed to and then some?

In a word: vibes, fueled in large part by a data-be-damned public rage machine otherwise known as TikTok.
Next year's presidential elections will have a lot less to do with the mainstream media's fixation on red states versus blue states, or MAGA versus democracy, and a lot more to do with the socialized pop punditry from TikTokers, who almost no one over 40 years old has ever heard of. . .

Recent studies by the Pew Research Center found that news consumption across social media sites is either stagnant or declining—except on TikTok, where more and more Americans are turning to get their political news. Roughly a third of U.S. adults under the age of 30 now rely on the platform to keep abreast of current events. It's upending traditional constituencies, and has put young voters who have historically veered to the left in their voting habits now up for grabs.