By Madison Yang
During the 2024 election season, politicians spread their campaigning efforts on TikTok, targeting the audiences of micro-influencers on the app.
Given the rise of TikTok– and in turn, its influencers that the younger generation watches daily– voters are looking toward people they view as part of their community to gain information about the election.
In a recent poll by YouGov for The Wall Street Journal, The Economist shows that Americans have been turning away from poll results and news media for election information.
With approximately 170 million users active on the app every day, who are the new key messengers that create political content on TikTok? Micro-influencers.
Having a range of 10,000 to 100,000 followers, micro-influencers tend to excel in a specific niche and are considered more authentic due to their relatively smaller following.
Sharing similar backgrounds with micro-influencers such as ethnicity, age, and gender impacts peoples’ algorithms as they are encouraged to engage with that content.
Voters like Engy Azer, a third-year psychology student at Long Beach State, viewed a majority of election information through micro-influencers who identify similarly to herself.
“I’m like a first-time voter this year…so it kind of helped me to see people my age and their viewpoints on things,” Azer said.
Azer said that her algorithm features videos that lean left and TikTok was where she gained her knowledge on election information including Kamala Harris’ policies.
TikTok’s specifically curated algorithm enables users to see content that suits individual tastes. As a result, political news that users see on their “For You Page” is likely to lean towards the political party they align with the most.
Dawson De La Torre, a fourth-year student majoring in aerospace engineering, said that the way the algorithm works makes it easier for micro-influencers to keep spreading information to users of the same political party.
“It’s very polarized on TikTok,” De La Torre said.
With the 2024 elections, Political Action Committees (PACs) invested millions of dollars in online influencers. These creators are often paid to attend political conventions, or talk online about a specific candidate.
As micro-influencers see more audience engagement due to followers feeling a deeper connection to their specialized content and the persona they present, their relatively lower follower counts are insignificant compared to the huge impact they have on their community.
This makes micro-influencers the target group of influencers when trying to gain voter support– voters will listen to an online creator who they like.
“Seeing [micro-influencers] pop up on TikTok brings up some good points. So it could definitely influence a lot of people,” De La Torre said, in regards to how micro-influencers have shaped the younger voting generation during this 2024 election season.
While turning to social media is a popular method of consuming news, TikTok’s specialized algorithm is dangerous when it spreads misinformation.
Some micro-influencers base their political content off of fake or fear mongering content, essentially recycling the ideas of others.
Specializing in the interaction between ideology and media consumption, Nathen Cruz, a political science professor at Long Beach State, expands on the importance of younger generations fact-checking easily accessible political online information.
“One of the most useful methods of examining if something is fake news or not is to track down the source,” Cruz said. “Tracking down who pays a journalist’s salary or sponsored a particular article can tell you a lot, such as their motivations.”
It is important to learn about our country’s politics through sources we trust and people we can relate to, but validating those sources and knowing how biased social media is essential.
“One needs to have a genuine willingness to want to know the facts of the case. This means people have to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” Cruz said.
