What CSMaP Experts Are Watching Ahead of the 2024 Election: Part Three

This is the third article in a series on the 2024 election. Read parts one and two.

In this year of elections, many worry that a variety of factors could undermine the integrity of the electoral process, including advances in generative AI, a surge of disinformation and foreign influence campaigns, threats to election officials, and declining trust in media and other democratic institutions.

While it’s too early to rigorously research and understand the impact of these concerns, our scholars and experts — past, present, and future — are closely watching several issues in the 2024 elections. 

This article, the third in a series, highlights several themes that emerged from our team.

The Influence of Political Memes

With the emergence of Kamala Harris as the likely Democratic nominee, and the media hype surrounding enthusiasm for her campaign and the use of memes, CSMaP Co-Director Jonathan Nagler is watching whether those memes evolve into real information about the candidate, who will drive the campaign narrative online, and what differences will exist across platforms.

A meme can show that other people like a candidate. And that is informative: it is useful information if a voter finds out that their friends like a candidate. But can the social media space around Harris evolve to include information about the candidate’s policy positions or some other characteristics? Can memes provide information of legislative accomplishments or performance of the economy during the Biden administration? Can they inform voters about the failed border bill that Republicans would not support? Will the social media space include accurate information about the crime rate in the United States? And for Republican use of social media, will it move beyond fear mongering about immigrants, and try to attribute actual policy failures around the border to the Biden administration? 

More generally, given that the cost of producing content has fallen so much, will members of the mass public producing content echo themes chosen by the Harris campaign, or will they produce whatever they choose? And if they do so — which set of content will be seen by more people, and which will be more influential?  

Finally, what will the divergence of the online platform space do? Will content seen be similar across platforms? And if it is not, is that because of production, or because of algorithms? Unfortunately, without the platforms substantially opening up access, this will be almost impossible to know. Whether TikTok or Twitter’s algorithm influences peoples’ views and the election will be virtually impossible to determine.

The Nationalization of Elections

One area that Maggie Macdonald, a CSMaP Faculty Research Affiliate, is watching and researching is the increasing nationalization of American elections, and how this shapes what politicians say. 

This can be seen in the actual posts of campaigns on platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, or Truth Social, but also in their media appearances and speeches, which are then clipped and shared on the platforms. These sorts of nationalized messages can include party leaders and presidential candidates, immigration, and culture war issues such as abortion or LGBTQ rights. Politicians make these statements to go viral, to gain attention from other political influencers, and to raise money from people across the country.

However, there are several negative implications of these campaign communication strategies. If a candidate for the U.S. House, for example, prioritizes tweeting about national issues and politicians to raise money from people outside of their district, they are less representative of their constituents’ preferences. It can also make it harder for elected officials to come to a compromise. When candidates of both parties engage in this behavior, on the campaign trail and in office, it can leave more moderate Americans feeling like they don’t have a political home and may make them less likely to pay attention to politics and to vote.

Content Moderation & Election Denial

This election season, CSMaP Graduate Research Affiliate Megan A. Brown is interested in how platforms are moderating (or not moderating) election denial content.

In the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. elections, most platforms labeled or moderated content that expressed doubt in the elections either by providing context labels or removing the content outright. This year, many platforms have rolled back those policies. For example, YouTube announced that they will stop moderating content that espouses false claims about previous elections in the United States. Meta (including Facebook and Instagram), similarly, will remove misinformation about voting processes and procedures that may interfere with someone's ability to vote, but they will not remove claims that previous elections have been stolen. 

As moderation policies have changed since 2020, researchers' access to data has also changed. Since 2023, data access for social media platforms has largely diminished with the shut down of the Twitter Academic API track, the closure of the Pushshift Reddit Archive to academics, and the imminent sunsetting of CrowdTangle (Meta's former transparency tool, which is being replaced by the Meta Content Library). In a year with elections occurring worldwide, researchers have fewer avenues for access to data that tells us how election denial information is spreading online.