Influencers played an important role in this election, and new research shows that they are overwhelmingly male and more likely to be conservative than liberal.
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Social media influencers had a major impact on this year’s election, according to a new study, and it stands to reason that this trend will continue in the future.
The poll from the Pew Research Center found that 21 percent of adults are regularly getting their news from news influencers, who are largely male and skew conservative.
It should be noted that a plurality of these influencers (48 percent) do not clearly identify as either right-leaning or left-leaning. However, there are some hugely popular social media personalities, like podcaster Joe Rogan, who may technically count as nonpartisan but clearly now heavily favor Republicans.
While these influencers are generally not known for being accurate or unbiased, and many of them are actively spreading misinformation, nearly two-thirds of Americans who get their “news” from them said they “have helped them better understand current events and civic issues.”
The younger people are, the more they rely on Internet personalities to keep them “informed.”
While a mere 7 percent of those 65 and older follow influencers, 37 percent of those aged 18-29 do.
The people who get their news from these sources are evenly split along partisan lines. However, since far more of them say they agree with most of what they see (30 percent) than those who mostly disagree (2 percent), it seems logical that the conservative ideology of influencers benefits Republicans.
The study will also be music to the ears of Elon Musk, who wants his social media platform X to replace journalism as a source of news.
Part of the appeal of influencers seems to be that Americans feel that the news they get from these online accounts “is at least somewhat different from the news they get from other sources.”
The vast majority of these influencers are on X (85 percent), followed by Instagram (50 percent) and YouTube (44 percent).
While Republicans like to claim that social media platforms are controlled by liberals, the study shows this is not the case (obviously, this should go without saying since one of them is controlled by a right-wing billionaire who was instrumental in getting Donald Trump into the White House).
Conservative influencers play an especially large role on Facebook, where they outnumber left-leaning online personalities by three-to-one.
TikTok, which Republicans in Congress are trying to shut down, is the least ideologically biased, and it also has the smallest gender gap.
Here, half of the influencers are male, and 45 percent are female. That may also explain why it is the only platform in which left-leaning influencers outnumber right-leaning ones (28 percent to 25 percent).
More than three-quarters of influencers have no current or past affiliation with a news organization. Surprisingly, of those who do, only 9 percent identify as left-leaning while 25 percent explicitly state that they are conservatives.
