From Beyoncé to Hot Summer, celebrity endorsements and dangerous times have been less important in this US election

After the US election, Slate writer Scaachi Koul says some of the buzzier pop culture moments in the US election campaign – such as a post by singer Charli XCX describing Kamala Harris as a “brat” – seems to have had no effect on the results.

“What's worse, the cultural moments that we thought weren't important,” he said while talking to the CBC's. A commotion.

“I thought it was funny when Kamala and Charli XCX did the brake thing. Yeah, I could laugh about it, but it didn't matter.”

But, Koul says it may soon be possible to say that the endorsements of celebrities like Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Beyoncé ended up voting in one way or another.

“We don't know enough about why people voted the way they did to be able to say anything about this yet.”

Speaking in the same episode, cultural commentator Pablo The Don said that people follow what they perceive to be true.

“I think a random person with consistent tweets on Twitter might have more power than Beyoncé to swing an election right now,” they said.

It's hard to sell voting on social media

Columbia University political science professor Donald Green told CBC News that social media is unlikely to be very effective in getting out the vote.

“I have to distinguish between the social media blasts done by influencers on the one hand and the communication of people who are friends of people on the same social network,” Green said.

“The latter usually works and the former is not very clear, but maybe it doesn't work, and social media advertising probably doesn't work,” he said, noting that it's easier for celebrities to sell you something than to get it. vote.

“It's something you can't do at the time, and voting tends to slow down over time.”

Green also noted that the average social media audience is small, “and that audience, if it had come in large numbers, would have put Harris over the top.”

Exit survey from Edison Research quoted by Reuters Harris won the support of 55 percent of voters aged 18-29, compared to 42 percent for Donald Trump.

Green says there was an initial three-to-four-week period for Harris' vacation, but after that, support for both candidates seemed to stagnate.

“They had almost exactly the same poll numbers from the debate.”

He says that it seems to him that the result of the election is “due to widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, rightly or wrongly, and some kind of sense that the country is on the wrong track.”

WATCH | Harris campaigned with Beyoncé, Trump sat down with Joe Rogan:

Harris campaigns with Beyoncé, Trump sits down with Rogan as election day approaches

With two weeks to go before the American election, the presidential candidates have turned to American media celebrities to promote their platforms. In Texas, Vice President Kamala Harris was joined on stage by singer Beyoncé, while former president Donald Trump recorded an appearance on UFC color commentator Joe Rogan's podcast.

It influences the algorithm

Wael Jabr, an assistant professor in the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems at Pennsylvania State University, says that people are more likely to be influenced by a message the more they hear it, and that means campaigns are informing social media influencers.

“We don't usually click on ads … So they see that this is not how you influence your feed,” he said. “You don't pay influencers as much and you have a stronger impact than ads.”

One of the biggest influencers, Elon Musk, is a Trump supporter who owns the social media platform X. Jabr says he thinks Musk's post on X had an impact.

“I think what's helpful is, he tweets a lot, and he has a huge fan base,” he said. “So now you're creating more volume on the platform and therefore influencing the algorithm.”

A changing information ecosystem

Meanwhile, Green says that if anything can be taken away from this election about social media, it has to do with how the information ecosystem has changed over the decades.

“One of the most remarkable things about this election is that even though it was full of scandals, Trump didn't face any problems,” he said. “His staunch supporters came out looking for him and they didn't really waver.”

Green believes that has to do with the way social media shows people content they've already engaged with in some way.

“The network of support programs that will keep people committed to their commitment to Trump exists now in a way that would not have been true 40 to 50 years ago.”