After the US election, Slate writer Scaachi Koul says some of them loudest moments in pop culture of the US election campaign – like singer Charli XCX’s post describing Kamala Harris as a “slut” – didn’t seem to have an impact on the results.

“Overwhelmingly, the cultural moments that I thought mattered weren’t,” she said while speaking to the CBC. Agitation.

“I thought it was cute when Kamala and Charli XCX were doing this crazy thing. Yes, I can laugh about it, but it didn’t matter.”

But Koul says it’s probably too early to tell whether endorsements from celebrities like Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Beyoncé ultimately swung the vote one way or the other.

“We don’t know enough yet about why people voted the way they did to say anything more about that.”

Speaking about the same episode, cultural critic Pablo The Don said that people follow what they perceive to be authentic.

“I think the random person who has consistent viral tweets on Twitter might have more power than Beyoncé in the various elections right now,” they said.

Harder to sell the vote on social media

Columbia University political science professor Donald Green told CBC News it’s unlikely that social media was terribly effective at getting out the vote.

“I would have to differentiate between social media blasts of influencers, on the one hand, and friend-to-friend communication by people who are in the same social network,” Green said.

“The latter tends to work, and the former is ambiguous, but probably not, and social media advertising almost certainly doesn’t work,” he said, noting that it’s easier for celebrities to sell you something than it is for them to bring vote.

“It’s something you can do right then and there, whereas voting tends to move slowly over time.”

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Green also noted that the typical social media audience is younger, “and that’s an audience that, if it had turned out in larger numbers, would have put Harris over the top.”

An exit poll from Edison Research quoted by Reuters Harris won the support of 55% of voters aged 18 to 29, compared to 42% for Donald Trump.

Green says there was an initial honeymoon period of three to four weeks for Harris, but after that, support for both candidates appeared to remain static.

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

He says he thinks the election result “is due to widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, rightly or wrongly, and a kind of feeling that the country is on the wrong track.”

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Influencing the algorithm

Wael Jabr, 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 value influencers on networks social.

“We rarely do ads … So they realize that’s not how you influence your feed,” he said. “Pay influencers not much money and have a bigger impact than ads.”

One of the biggest influencers of all, Elon Musk, is a Trump supporter who owns the social media platform X. Jabr says he believes Musk’s posts on X have been influential.

“I think what’s helpful is that he tweets a lot and has a big follower base,” he said. “So now you’re creating a lot of volume in the platform and therefore influencing this algorithm.”

A changing information ecosystem

Meanwhile, Green says if there’s one takeaway from this election in terms of 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 while it was filled with a series of scandals, Trump didn’t really suffer a setback,” he said. “His loyal supporters came through for him and never wavered.”

Green believes this has to do with how social media shows people content they’ve already engaged with in some way.

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