Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Shutdown: We Are Beating the 47 Regime Meme Machine
...Democrats finally seem to have found a human message during the government shutdown, leveraging the left’s messy creator ecosystem to beat the Trump meme machine.
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The D.N.C., which went megaviral on TikTok and X with a cutesy/weird shutdown explainer clip starring kittens, jumped 24 spots on Resonate’s ranking of social media accounts compared to the previous week. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also collected millions of views with a widely shared walk-and-talk video explaining the Obamacare subsidy cliff. Photo: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty
Last Wednesday, in the hours after the government officially went into shutdown mode, researchers at Resonate, a firm that monitors online discourse for Democrats, began to notice something unusual: For once, the left was actually winning a message battle online.
Posts about the shutdown—outraged reactions, explainer videos from creators and Democratic politicians, attacks on Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress—were noticeably overperforming on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Mainstream news accounts as well as left-leaning ones like MeidasTouch, Courier Newsroom, and NowThis Impact were seeing nearly twice as much engagement on the major platforms as they normally do. Clicks, views, and shares were spiking for liberal creators like Aaron Parnas, Harry Sisson, and Dean Withers.
Democratic politicians themselves, finally getting comfortable spreading their message through their own videos after decades of relying on cable news, were also seeing big numbers. California Rep. Sara Jacobs got almost 10 million views on a “spooky” TikTok about the shutdown filmed in the dark, while Sen. Adam Schiff, who has quietly amassed half a million YouTube subscribers, has netted more than a million views on his shutdown explainers since last week. And while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries faced some mockery inside the Beltway for a 24-hour YouTube livestream that didn’t get very many views at all, that was just one of his news media efforts post-shutdown: A Meidas interview with Jeffries last week has been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube and Substack combined.
Meanwhile, right-leaning pages that usually swagger through the hallways of the political internet—including the official White House accounts and those of prolific posters like Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec, and Catturd—were seeing slightly less engagement than usual on the big platforms, down roughly 5 percent across the board. On X, where MAGA usually has the home-field advantage, Gavin Newsom and progressive talker Mehdi Hasan both received more engagement this past week than did the White House account and its ferocious partner, RapidResponse47.
One reason: The Trump administration’s sombrero-themed meme attacks on Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Jeffries, claiming that Democrats wanted to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants, didn’t seem to hit the mark. Resonate found that right-leaning pages in their tracking mentioned sombreros 126 times last Wednesday—but those posts underperformed their average engagement levels by 40 percent. “The healthcare for illegals argument, what we call ‘sombrero posting,’ did not really seem to be getting them anywhere,” said Eric Coffin-Gould, the vice president of analytics at Resonate. “Anything that goes up on Donald Trump’s accounts is always going to perform well, but outside of that, they seemed to actually be underperforming.”
On the other hand, left-leaning shutdown posts that included references to healthcare—specifically, the Democratic argument that Republicans were preparing to ax health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans—were performing four times as well as content that didn’t mention the issue. The D.N.C., which went megaviral on TikTok and X with a cutesy/weird shutdown explainer clip starring kittens, jumped 24 spots on Resonate’s ranking of social media accounts compared to the previous week. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also collected millions of views with a widely shared walk-and-talk video explaining the Obamacare subsidy cliff.
Crucially, Resonate also found that Dem-friendly messaging was traveling beyond political echo chambers. Shutdown news was suddenly appearing on the pages of Pubity and RapTV, while generally nonpolitical creators like Cristian Maldonado and Vivian Tu of Your Rich BFF were making posts about the stalemate, racking up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. “What immediately started to break through, for the normies, were the explanations and explainer videos,” said Carly Evans, Resonate’s director of analytics. “But those have a pretty short shelf life, and the challenge for Democrats is going to be figuring out how to keep competing for attention in a longer fight.”
....
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The D.N.C., which went megaviral on TikTok and X with a cutesy/weird shutdown explainer clip starring kittens, jumped 24 spots on Resonate’s ranking of social media accounts compared to the previous week. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also collected millions of views with a widely shared walk-and-talk video explaining the Obamacare subsidy cliff. Photo: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty
Last Wednesday, in the hours after the government officially went into shutdown mode, researchers at Resonate, a firm that monitors online discourse for Democrats, began to notice something unusual: For once, the left was actually winning a message battle online.
Posts about the shutdown—outraged reactions, explainer videos from creators and Democratic politicians, attacks on Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress—were noticeably overperforming on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Mainstream news accounts as well as left-leaning ones like MeidasTouch, Courier Newsroom, and NowThis Impact were seeing nearly twice as much engagement on the major platforms as they normally do. Clicks, views, and shares were spiking for liberal creators like Aaron Parnas, Harry Sisson, and Dean Withers.
Democratic politicians themselves, finally getting comfortable spreading their message through their own videos after decades of relying on cable news, were also seeing big numbers. California Rep. Sara Jacobs got almost 10 million views on a “spooky” TikTok about the shutdown filmed in the dark, while Sen. Adam Schiff, who has quietly amassed half a million YouTube subscribers, has netted more than a million views on his shutdown explainers since last week. And while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries faced some mockery inside the Beltway for a 24-hour YouTube livestream that didn’t get very many views at all, that was just one of his news media efforts post-shutdown: A Meidas interview with Jeffries last week has been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube and Substack combined.
Meanwhile, right-leaning pages that usually swagger through the hallways of the political internet—including the official White House accounts and those of prolific posters like Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec, and Catturd—were seeing slightly less engagement than usual on the big platforms, down roughly 5 percent across the board. On X, where MAGA usually has the home-field advantage, Gavin Newsom and progressive talker Mehdi Hasan both received more engagement this past week than did the White House account and its ferocious partner, RapidResponse47.
One reason: The Trump administration’s sombrero-themed meme attacks on Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Jeffries, claiming that Democrats wanted to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants, didn’t seem to hit the mark. Resonate found that right-leaning pages in their tracking mentioned sombreros 126 times last Wednesday—but those posts underperformed their average engagement levels by 40 percent. “The healthcare for illegals argument, what we call ‘sombrero posting,’ did not really seem to be getting them anywhere,” said Eric Coffin-Gould, the vice president of analytics at Resonate. “Anything that goes up on Donald Trump’s accounts is always going to perform well, but outside of that, they seemed to actually be underperforming.”
On the other hand, left-leaning shutdown posts that included references to healthcare—specifically, the Democratic argument that Republicans were preparing to ax health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans—were performing four times as well as content that didn’t mention the issue. The D.N.C., which went megaviral on TikTok and X with a cutesy/weird shutdown explainer clip starring kittens, jumped 24 spots on Resonate’s ranking of social media accounts compared to the previous week. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also collected millions of views with a widely shared walk-and-talk video explaining the Obamacare subsidy cliff.
Crucially, Resonate also found that Dem-friendly messaging was traveling beyond political echo chambers. Shutdown news was suddenly appearing on the pages of Pubity and RapTV, while generally nonpolitical creators like Cristian Maldonado and Vivian Tu of Your Rich BFF were making posts about the stalemate, racking up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. “What immediately started to break through, for the normies, were the explanations and explainer videos,” said Carly Evans, Resonate’s director of analytics. “But those have a pretty short shelf life, and the challenge for Democrats is going to be figuring out how to keep competing for attention in a longer fight.”
....
https://puck.news/how-democrats-are-winning-the-shutdown-blame-wars/