Studying the 2024 Election — and Beyond

We’re now three weeks removed from another monumental presidential election. If you’re like us, you’ve been reading article after article trying to understand the results. Various theories have been suggested, including a continuation of a global anti-incumbent trend and the Trump campaign’s successful efforts to target young men. 

What’s clear is that the online information environment — which remains critical for how Americans learn about politics — continues to shift substantially from election to election. Conducting rigorous research to understand this landscape is more important than ever.

The Fracturing Media Environment

We’re long past the days when Americans' media options for information about politics came almost exclusively from TV, radio, and print news. Even the online world of a decade ago, when just a handful of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter dominated political discourse, seems quaint compared to today. In this election, Americans could get their news in more places than ever before. 

According to the Pew Research Center, for example, 17 percent of Americans in 2024 regularly get news from TikTok and 32 percent from YouTube, compared to 3 percent and 23 percent, respectively, in 2020. Another analysis shows that 21 percent of Americans get news from online influencers, including 37 percent of adults under 30. And 47 percent listened to a podcast in the last month, including 60 percent of those under 35.

As this online ecosystem shifts, it presents significant challenges for researchers. Most mainstream platforms have restricted or eliminated access to the data we’ve used to study elections in the past. At the same time, new types of content, as well as the lightning-fast spread of information, makes it increasingly difficult to grasp online dynamics.

Studying the New Online Ecosystem

At CSMaP, we’ve been preparing for this shift, developing innovative ways to study the fractured information environment. For example, we’ve spun up new data collections to explore how politics is talked about on video-based platforms, podcasts, and messaging apps. Since most research focuses on the United States, we’ve also expanded our focus to explore countries around the globe, with new experiments in Brazil, India, South Africa, and Ukraine.

In addition, one unique aspect of CSMaP’s work is our ability to pair traditional surveys with digital trace data from respondents. Since 2016, we’ve worked with YouGov to regularly survey more than 4,000 Americans about their media habits and political views, collecting Facebook, Twitter, and web-browsing data from a subset of respondents. This data has powered some of CSMaP’s most notable research thus far, including a 2019 paper finding that older Americans were much more likely to share false news on Facebook and a 2023 study indicating that exposure to Russia’s 2016 foreign influence campaign on Twitter had little direct relationship to changes in voter behavior or attitudes.  

The Importance of Rigorous Research

There’s seemingly endless commentary about what happened in the 2024 election and why. As academic scholars, our priority is conducting rigorous research, at scale, examining the intersection of digital media and democracy. This type of research informs the press, policymakers, and, ultimately, the public.

Unfortunately, over the past few years, research on the digital information environment has come under attack at the same time that access to online data has become more restricted. Several of our peer scholars and institutions have been targeted. Against this backdrop, the principles of academic freedom, independence, and transparency are more important than ever, including access to data necessary to know what information people are being exposed to. At CSMaP, we are committed to continuing our research and work in this area — to understand politics, improve the public conversation, and strengthen democracy in the digital age.