It was the Year of Political Acceptance

After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators have become part of mainstream political media this year, bringing election news, analysis and political commentary to online fans while avoiding the traditional press.

Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden serenaded the camera the deliciously edgy TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders lashed out at Kamala Harris in a Twitch stream he hosted anime catboy VTuber. Donald Trump collaborated with creative brothers Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of devoting time to traditional sit-down interviews with the mainstream press, Harris and Trump relied on creatives to amplify voices and spread campaign messages.

“There’s no point in talking to The New York Times or The Washington Post about my colleagues in the mainstream media in the general election because they (the readers) are already with us,” said campaign manager for Harris, Rep. Rob Flaherty. told Semafor in December.

It became an influence A $250 billion industry. More than 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they follow an influencer on social media. A Pew Research survey found last year. A more recent survey, published in Novemberfound that one in five US adults get their news from news influencers. This shift in media consumption has been met with record spending on creative partnerships. US priorities allocate at least $1 million for influencer marketing. Harris campaign paid at least 2.5 million dollars to management agencies that commission creatives for political advertising campaigns.

Creators were everywhere this election — Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, rallies, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations for this creator’s takeover of political messaging were laid nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Trump showed how social media platforms like Twitter can influence voters. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the 2020 election spent more than 300 million dollars on the presidential campaign and the Biden administration, which employs influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates regularly invited creators to the White House for briefings.

Embracing creators, politicians have begun to erase the boundaries between talking heads and journalists. Unlike journalists, newsmakers often ignore editorial standards and substantial fact-checking — one of the more high-profile defamation lawsuits — but for now, it makes the difference. Many creatives work in the same way that journalists do – absorbing news, translating it and delivering it to an audience online. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them act more like fans than objective observers. Some are clearly party activists. Again, they are often provided with similar access to what traditional press buys.