Social Media Influencers and the 2020 Election

January 13th 2020

Twitter (Claudio Toledo)

Bill Berkowitz 

Social media influencers are shaping popular culture: They peddle everything from handbags to skincare products, from weight-loss supplements to SUVs. In a column for Social Media Today, Shane Barker pointed out that “there's a digital influencer for every product, and increasingly, more businesses are joining the influencer marketing bandwagon as a means to improve their marketing and outreach strategies.” 

Even if you don’t pay much attention to social media, you’ve likely heard of the term “social media influencer.” Here is  a Social Media Influencers 101 crash course: “… social media influencers …leverage creative content for paying contracts with businesses big and small that want to gain access to their audiences and curated platforms,” Je’Don Holloway Talley recently wrote in Alabama’s Birmingham Times. “Their organic reach and authenticity can garner interest and paid sponsorships, ambassadorships, and income for high-profile content creators. These social media mavens understand the game: algorithms, reach, consistency, quality, and, most importantly, how to grab your attention and keep it.” (Holloway has written a series of articles on black women social influencers which can be found here).

Abundantly successful marketing products, will social media influencers be enlisted in Election 2020, to market political candidates?

Last year, Twitter banned political ads; Google is prohibiting political ads that target users based on age, gender and postal code. (Facebook, however, is even letting candidates lie in their ads. According to The New York Times Facebook said "that it would continue to allow political campaigns to use the site to target advertisements to particular slices of the electorate and that it would not police the truthfulness of the messages sent out.”) In the run-up to Election 2020, now that these options are being somewhat limited, how will political organizations reach large social media audiences? 

 “The crackdown on political ads comes at a time when industry experts say influencer marketing was already starting to attract more attention from political campaigns looking to target younger voters,” Morning Consult’s Sam Sabin recently wrote. 

James Nord, founder and chief executive of New York-based influencer marketing agency Fohr, wonders whether getting involved in politics threatens an influencers “authenticity.” “To have someone that you trust talk about something like politics and the need to vote or why a specific candidate is more appealing than another, that carries more weight,” Nord said.

“If Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, everyone said we’re not doing political advertising anymore,  there would be a big desire for campaigns to make sure that they had a voice inside of those platforms,” Nord said. “And I could definitely see influencers becoming part of that voice.”

The Beijing-based video app TikTok, which is best known for its mostly lighthearted video content, has eschewed the use of its platform for politics. According to Business Insider,  “[I]n 2019 TikTok was active in discouraging the use of its platform for political ends: It banned political advertising in 2019 and also ran into trouble for suppressing certain political content, an action the company denied”. 

More recently, Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook, said: “Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikToc platform experience.”  

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group or issue at the federal, state or local level — including election-related ads, advocacy ads or issue ads,” he said.

“But keeping its platform entirely free of political content will be difficult for the platform for a few reasons,” Business Insider’s Mariel Soto Reyes recently wrote. “For one, 42% of TikTok users in the US fall between 18-24, with an additional 28% in the 13-17 range, per figures cited by the WSJ and those demographics tend to use social media as a means of social and political expression.”

Further, that same young audience is too valuable for politicians to pass up, even if they can't engage in paid advertising: 70% of TikTok users in the US are of voting age and campaign officials have taken note, and official efforts to make use of the platform can be indirect. For instance Trump's campaign manager was clear he's looking for ways to mint deals with influencers on the TikTok, as expressed paid political advertising is banned. Likewise, organizations like ACRONYM — a progressive non-profit — are exploring use cases for the app, including using influencers to encourage voter registration.

If political content grows in popularity on TikTok, it could present the company with a content moderation issue it's not fully prepared to face — especially in an election year. TikTok is still a very young company, and it's likely that its decisions to ban political advertising and suppress political content thus far were due to a lack of both the capability and desire to moderate such high-stakes content.

A new report by We Are Social, titled “Think Forward,” looks at digital trends for the coming decade. The report pointed out that “Historically, the internet has been exempt from the rules and restrictions of the physical world.” In 2020, “a new set of rules [are] being enforced by users, creators, platforms and authorities.” How these rules will impact the attempted politicization of social media influencers is anybody’s guess. Stay tuned.