News Influencers Have Eclipsed Traditional Media

There’s new data released this week confirming much of what I’ve written in this newsletter for the past year: More and more Americans are getting their news from influencers on the internet.

The Pew Research Center, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, released a report this week that found that around one in five US adults regularly receive news from news influencers, or what the study defines as a person who consistently posts news-related content with more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube.

That’s more than 50 million people getting their news this way. When Pew asked adults from the ages of 18 to 29 years old, that number increased to 37 percent. Come 2028 (sorry!), these audiences will likely grow even bigger, with creators taking an even more dominant role in news distribution and consumption.

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It seems like the Republicans have already figured this out. The Trump campaign’s willingness to engage and speak at length with friendly creators was advantageous for the campaign, as they leaned heavily on the vast right-wing media ecosystem online, from podcasts to content creators. Right-leaning creators have been steadily building an entire online ecosystem that feeds into their political ideology. A majority of the most popular podcasts in the US are conservative-leaning—including The Joe Rogan Experience, The Charlie Kirk Show, and The Candace Owens Show.

Many of the pro-Trump creators and news sites that played a major role in this cycle are reportedly vying for seats in the administration’s press briefing room too. At least two “MAGA-aligned news outlets” and a variety of influencers, including Sage Steele and Elizabeth Pipko, plan to apply for White House press credentials, according to Axios.

Even though conservative voices appeared to be the loudest online during this election cycle, Pew found that around 27 percent of creators self-identify as conservative, compared to 21 percent who skew liberal. Almost half had no clear political affiliation. Pew also found that a majority of all news influencers are men at 63 percent across major social media platforms. TikTok’s gender disparity was the smallest, with 50 percent of news influencers identifying as men and 45 percent identifying as women. TikTok was the only platform where left-leaning influencers outnumbered those on the right.

Since the election, Democrats have been discussing what all they can do to combat the right’s online popularity.

“I hope that it convinces Democrats that we need to invest in this more. They need to be working with creators, not just young creators but all types of creators, to try to bring our numbers up on some of these platforms,” says Ryan Davis, cofounder and chief operating officer at People First, a political influencer and relational marketing firm that partnered with the Biden and Harris campaigns.

Amelia Montooth, a progressive creator who supported the Harris campaign, believes that Democrats need to get to work building their own progressive media ecosystem. She’s thinking not just a liberal Joe Rogan or individual progressive influencers, but entire outlets. She’s actually already trying to do that herself: Montooth is also the cofounder and CEO of Mutuals Media, a new digital-first media company trying to unseat right-leaning culture brands like Barstool and Old Row.

“What the right does really well is having a funnel that I believe starts with Barstool Sports that reaches mass audiences,” says Montooth. “The left is missing the top and middle of those funnels … Rather than working with individual influencers, they should focus on building that piece of the ecosystem, that funnel.”

One of the more surprising findings in the Pew report was that most of the news influencers included in the study have X accounts (85 percent). YouTube was second in line with 50 percent of creators using the platform. The report doesn’t get into how active they are on X, but it shows that most creators, at the time the study was conducted, saw the platform as the primary avenue for receiving and sharing news online.

Even with new options like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, X still has a monopoly on text-based social platforms. However, the report doesn’t account for the post-election shift away from X. In the coming weeks and months, however, I’m curious how that 85 percent could fall in the face of new competition from alternatives like Bluesky, which has grown to more than 20 million users after the election. Musk wanted X to be the digital town square, but the billionaire’s backing of Trump could be making that dream less possible.

The Chatroom

Are you one of these 50 million people who get at least some of their news from news influencers? Who do you follow? Why do you trust them? Are there lessons traditional media could learn from them? I want to hear what you think!

Send your thoughts to [email protected].

WIRED Reads

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• Trump's FCC Pick Wants to Be the Speech Police. That's Not His Job: Trump appointee to lead the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr wants to turn the agency into an online speech police. Experts tell WIRED it will be an uphill battle.

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What Else We’re Reading

🔗 The Weirdest Domains Alex Jones Has to Give to The Onion: The Onion bought out Info Wars last week, and the infamous conspiracy site comes with a handful of silly domain names, like goblinlove.com and cuckdorsey.com. (Gizmodo)

🔗 Truth Social Investors Hoped to Get ‘Very Rich’ After Trump’s Win. Not Quite: Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters went all-in buying Truth Social stock. The former president’s reelection was supposed to turbocharge the company’s value, but it has yet to do so. (The Washington Post)

🔗 Maxwell Frost Runs to Be First Gen Z Congressional Leader: Democrats are still reeling from their election losses, but soon they’ll select DNC leaders who could take them in a new direction. Maxwell Frost, a congressperson from Florida who led digitally-savvy campaigns, announced this week that he’s jumping in the race to co-chair the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. (Axios)

The Download

On the WIRED Politics Lab podcast this week, Leah talks to Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert about Bluesky, X, and the fragmentation of social media platforms.

I’m taking a break from the newsletter over Thanksgiving, but it will be back in your inboxes December 5.

For now, here’s Justin Trudeau making a milkshake with a sweet old man on TikTok.

That’s it for today—thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with me via email, Instagram, X, Bluesky, and Signal at makenakelly.32.