This was the year of the Political Influencer Takeover

After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators have become a part of mainstream political media this year, delivering election news, analysis and political commentary to their fans online — all while displacing traditional print.

Joe Biden, 81, was serenaded in front of the camera the TikTok singer delightfully cringes Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders stumped for Kamala Harris in a Twitch stream cohosted by a VTuber catboy anime. Donald Trump has teamed up with the quintessentially creative brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of making time for traditional sit-down interviews with the mainstream press, Harris and Trump are relying on creators to galvanize votes and spread their campaign messages.

“There’s just no value — as far as my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election to talk to the New York Times or to talk to the Washington Post, because those (readers) are already with us,” Rob Flaherty , vice campaign. Harris manager, he told Semafor in December.

The flu has become 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 The Pew Research survey found last year. A more recent survey, published in Novemberfound that one in five US adults get their news from news influences. That shift in media consumption has been met with record spending on creative partnerships. Priority USA is putting at least $1 million toward influencer marketing. The Harris campaign paid at least $2.5 million to management agencies that book creators for political advertising campaigns.

This election, creators were everywhere – the Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, demonstrations, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations of this creator’s take on political messaging were laid nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Trump showed how social media platforms like Twitter could influence voters. Throughout the 2020 election, the former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on a presidential campaign who recruited influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates, and the Biden administration guest creators as usual at the White House for briefings.

By embracing creators, politicians have begun to blur the lines between talking heads and journalists. Unlike journalists, news creators are often not bound by editorial standards and substantial fact-checking, something that is a cause of high-profile defamation far from changing, but which, for now, makes a difference . Many creators do work similar to what journalists do—absorbing, translating, and communicating news to online audiences. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them come across more as fans than as objective observers. Some are explicitly party activists. However, they often provide similar access to what the traditional press receives.