On the morning of November 6, 2024, tears welled in my eyes as I drove to school, the hum of the news murmuring softly in the background. One phrase echoed relentlessly in my mind: We lost. We lost. We lost. The woman for whom I had knocked on doors, debated with friends and family, and regarded as a beacon of American democracy had been defeated in the presidential election. Yet, this outcome was no great shock. At my small private school in the Bay Area, where pride flags hung alongside the stars and stripes, the rhetoric of inclusivity and justice—hallmarks of the American left—was woven into the fabric of our education. And yet, that morning, it became painfully clear that these ideals had not resonated with everyone. As my friends and I mourned, others in our class remained indifferent—or even celebratory—at the political shift. It was a sobering moment of realization: the once-unshakable dominance of the political left among young people was beginning to erode. But why? How has youth culture, long associated with progressivism, begun shifting in a different direction?
The current state of youth political culture bears little resemblance to its historical precedent. Student activism has long been at the core of many left-wing political movements, with young people taking leadership roles in the fight for a future free of war, pollution, and discrimination—from the Yippies and the SNCC in the ’60s to Greta Thunberg in the modern era. Perhaps this stems from a desire for a safe future for ourselves and our descendants or from our relative optimism compared to politically weathered adults. Regardless, youth culture has historically been the home base for liberal ideas. But in the 2024 election, Republican candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by 2% among young men, and Harris only managed to muster a 24% margin over Trump among young women—shrinking substantially from President Biden’s 35% lead among that demographic in 2020. So what changed?
In September of 2024, just under a month before Election Day, a video posted by the politics and pop-culture channel Jubilee, entitled “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?”, garnered over 26 million views. Featuring conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk, the video invited 25 self-proclaimed college liberals to debate various politically polarizing issues, including abortion and trans rights. While political discourse is essential to a successful democracy, the debate within this video was severely constrained by a 20-minute timer and a red-flag voting system for speakers, creating TikTok-ready soundbites rather than real conversation. Kirk maintained a firm hold on the discussion, rejecting student after student’s points with sarcasm and condescension. And clearly, the internet found his rhetoric compelling. Of the nearly 170,000 comments below the original video, the vast majority critiqued the students rather than Kirk’s arguments—a trend repeated across TikTok and Instagram Reels. This increasing focus on rhetoric rather than content is inherent as we hurtle into the modern digital age. According to an analysis published by the Pew Research Center in 2024, just over 39% of young adults regularly get news from TikTok, making the hours youth spend on that app central to their perceptions of the political world. Because TikTok monetizes users through advertising, its algorithm is based on four main goals: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作 者价值, and 平台价值—translated directly as “user value,” “long-term user value,” “creator value,” and “platform value.” Essentially, TikTok’s primary goal is to build an addictive and personalized feed to maximize usage, promoting the most engaging and thus polarizing content to keep its users hooked. This is why the Charlie Kirk video went viral. Provocative soundbites—many centering on the failures of the liberal students to combat Kirk’s arguments—have been made into over 70 million TikTok videos, which in turn have been viewed billions of times. The virality of the fervently right-wing views expressed in these video fragments ensured that American youth were repeatedly exposed to them, cementing perspectives they might have once considered extreme. Repeated exposure to media of a particular viewpoint shapes public political knowledge and behavior, making the provocative narratives popularized on social media central to users’ political views.
So how does this connect to the rising political conservatism among youth? The promotion of extremist content through social media algorithms ensures not only that today’s youth are constantly exposed to radical political views, but that they repeatedly encounter them, influencing their political consciousness. When I log on to TikTok today, I see liberal media personalities like Dean Withers and Naima Troutt, but the influencers my peers are exposed to are undoubtedly different. The proliferation of influencers and the drive to produce ever more viral content necessarily lead to an increase in the availability of extremist views. For previous generations, there was no TikTok, no Instagram, no algorithms isolating users in a sphere of provocative media designed to trap them in an internet rabbit hole. Political extremism existed—there were plenty of tabloids and talk radio shows—but it wasn’t available nor promoted to such a great degree. While this shift has undoubtedly pushed some in today’s generation further left, its impact is most visible in the growing population of young conservatives, a demographic that has long been eclipsed by dominant liberal youth culture. Now, social media has developed a burgeoning movement of young conservatives, and their influence is becoming ever clearer: the political left is losing youth culture to conservatism because of social media, making its future dismal in a generation whose political beliefs have become determined by the attention economy. On November 6th, my peers had not lacked empathy nor an understanding of our political world; they were supportive of this conservative shift, if only because of their TikTok feeds.
References
Innovations for Poverty Action. (n.d.). The effect of media on voting behavior and political opinions in the United States. Retrieved from
https://poverty-action.org/study/effect-media-voting-behavior-and-political-opinions-unit ed-states
NBC News. (2024). Yes, Trump improved with young men. But he drew even more young women to Biden. Retrieved from
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women rcna179019
Pew Research Center. (2024, September 17). More Americans regularly get news on TikTok. Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-americans-regularly-get-news -on-tiktok-espec
Roose, K. (2021, December 5). How TikTok’s algorithm figures out your deepest desires. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html