After the June mayoral primary, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz tweeted, “TikTok helped NYC elect a socialist.” It sure did—more than three quarters of voters under 30 went for Zohran Mamdani. We’ve come a long way from 1992, when Bill Clinton bypassed prime-time and Sunday political shows by wearing sunglasses and butchering “Heartbreak Hotel” on a saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show.”
Elections follow technology from newspapers to Teddy Roosevelt’s whistle-stop train tours, radio addresses, newsreels and sweaty Richard Nixon vs. John F. Kennedy in the first televised debate in 1960. Nixon later said of television, “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected.”
In February 2012, I asked on these pages, “When Will Social Media Elect a President?” The typical feedback I received was “never, you moron,” or words to that effect (welcome to my inbox).
In reality, social media helped Barack Obama that fall, not to mention name-calling tweeter Donald Trump in 2016. Not classy, but effective. Same for Trump 2.0 on podcasts (at 18-year-old son Barron’s urging). Yes, debates are important, but now it’s the one-liners, the zingers replayed on YouTube that matter. Mr. Mamdani flooded voters with viral videos.
Campaigning is always incremental. Volunteers still knock on doors and drop fliers. Lawns signs proliferate. TV ads multiply. But new technology swings elections. While California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on TV to push his redistricting Proposition 50, he also courted Substack writers, YouTubers like Brian Tyler Cohen (4.9 million subscribers) and let’s not forget TikTok star Mrs. Frazzled and her 100 million likes. The measure passed 64% to 36%.
Bari Weiss (who used to edit my pieces on this page) was brought in by new Paramount CEO David Ellison to turn around CBS News. I wish them luck, but do you know anyone under 50 who watches CBS? Under 40? Beyond video clips the next day?
So where is news being consumed? A September Pew Research survey shows almost half of 18- to 29-year-olds “regularly get news on TikTok.” For 30- to 49-year-olds, it’s 1 in 4. At least they’re getting informed.
Or are they? Zicheng Cheng at the University of Arizona studied 16 million TikTok videos from more than 160,000 public accounts and found, unsurprisingly, that “people on TikTok tend to follow accounts that align with their own political beliefs.” And critics worry about CNN or Fox News being echo chambers?
It’s going to get worse. Soon news will arrive via artificial intelligence. Research from the European Broadcasting Union looked at news-content responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity and found that “45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue”—based on things like sources, context, and what differentiates opinion and fact. Plus “20% contained major accuracy issues.”
But candidates need to meet voters where they live. For young voters, that’s TikTok. But it won’t be forever as the online landscape changes faster than singer Sabrina Carpenter changes outfits during her concerts. (For the record, I’ve never been to a Sabrina Carpenter concert, but I did accidentally watch her in a TikTok video.)
So what’s next? The answer requires thinking about the future of media, no easy task. Will it be chatbots? Augmented-reality glasses? Synthetic podcasts? Or simply some permutation of today’s media?
I think the biggest clue comes from a new OpenAI service called ChatGPT Pulse, introduced in late September. “Each night, it synthesizes information from your memory, chat history and direct feedback to learn what’s most relevant to you.” You can connect your Google email and calendar too, and let’s assume, eventually, your company’s Slack chats and everything else. And then once a day, it sends you a personalized note about your passions and interests. Let me hallucinate (the old-fashioned kind) a future marketing tag line: “It knows you better than you know you.”
This is the future of media: Personalized, not homogenized. “They’ll be so lonely, baby.” Chatbots won’t only know what you stream and shop for, they’ll figure out if you are liberal or conservative, progressive or hard right, moderate or apathetic—valuable for campaigns doling out advertising dollars. Influence will never be so easy.
For now, ChatGPT Pulse is available only to those paying for the $200-a-month Pro tier. I doubt this will be mainstream a year from now for the midterm elections, but I boldly predict that every AI chatbot service will have a Pulse-like offering by November 2028, perhaps even free.
Will campaigns be able to buy your attention, influence your daily thoughts, strongly suggest who you should vote for? Well, duh. Everything is for sale, especially when someone needs to pay for $1 trillion in data centers and make sure they don’t turn into Heartbreak Hotels.
Write to kessler@wsj.com.