News influencers favored Trump over Harris during campaign, study finds

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NEW YORK (AP) — Americans who followed news influencers during the presidential campaign were more likely to hear positive reports about Donald Trump than they were about Kamala Harris, a study has revealed.

Influencers reviewed by the Pew Research Center talked about Trump and Harris on social media about equally, but there were more posts about Trump and they tended to be more favorable.

Pew said roughly 20% of Americans regularly get news from influencers — podcasters, commentators and the like — and about two-thirds said it helps them better understand things. Pew analyzed more than 150,000 posts from about 500 influencers, defined as those who regularly comment on current events and have at least 100,000 followers on some combination of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube.

Trump courted this youth-oriented sector more actively than Harris did during the campaign. He was interviewed by the popular podcaster Joe Rogan, for example, while Harris did not get an appearance there.

The study found an equal amount of influencers — 42% — were critical of either the Republican or Democratic candidate for president.

Yet Trump earned his edge in volume; his supporters posted more often than Harris'. As an example, twice as many total posts about Harris on the Elon Musk-owned X site were critical than they were positive, while the ratio for Trump was more evenly split, Pew said.

And X is where most of the political influencers lived. Pew found that 79% of the political posts were on that site. On X, 48% of the influencers who posted there identified themselves as right-leaning, while 28% said they were more liberal.

On average, right-leaning news influencers posted 183 times per week. The more liberal ones posted 72 times on average, Pew said.

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social