If you open X or TikTok right now, you might be convinced that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to win the presidential election in a landslide. Donald Trump’s lead is disappearing, even in red states, people say, pointing to fringe polls and purported quotes from campaign insiders. Florida and Texas are turning blue. More women and young people have registered to vote. And some believe the stars are aligning and astrological clues point to her definitive ascendence to the top job.
Or, depending on what your feed looks like, you might see that Trump has this one in the bag. These believers cite a flood of MAGA hats in California, or a phalanx of children dressed as Trump (and, disturbingly, Trump’s would-be assassin) for Halloween in blue Philadelphia. Or that there’s less support for Harris among some demographics in swing states compared to when President Joe Biden won in 2020. New Hampshire and Virginia are turning red. Even X owner and Trump megadonor Elon Musk is extrapolating and framing early voting data to prematurely declare the prized swing state of Pennsylvania “will be a decisive Republican victory.”
In an election cycle where national and swing-state polls have been neck and neck for weeks, voters are taking to X and TikTok to confidently declare their candidate will win decisively. It’s a response to a time of extreme anxiety and uncertainty, when Americans are more polarized than ever and have been told “this will be the last election” if their candidate does not win. There are maps covered in blue and opposing ones covered in red, with Electoral College predictions swaying wildly. “Harris is about to win in a blowout,” one says. Others, Musk included, point to an electoral map based on Polymarket election-betting odds, rather than polls, as evidence that Trump will win. Each individual post might not be so significant — if it weren’t for powerful algorithms on TikTok and X that relentlessly push such posts out to others.
This is the type of content that social sites’ algorithms have long loved. Social-media conversations gather around extremes. People at the farthest ends of the ideological spectrum are most likely to post their views on social media, a 2021 study from the Pew Research Center found. Social platforms’ algorithms reward “this strong confidence and extreme opinions and engenders extreme reactions,” says Ioana Literat, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the coauthor of “Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media.” “If there’s a video that says, ‘Polls are too close to tell,’ that’s not going to be the post that gets the most likes.”
While the algorithms are in part to blame, we also have a deeply human aversion to uncertainty. To quiet the noise, we surround ourselves with others who feel confident that our shared candidate will win.
Other social platforms have sought to disentangle themselves from this kind of divisive political speech. In 2016, much brazen political dialogue took place on Facebook, where your opinionated uncle posted misinformation with abandon. For the past few years, Meta has pushed news out of Facebook feeds. And earlier this year, the company made further moves to de-emphasize political content on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. All of this follows accusations that Facebook basically “destroyed democracy,” as Megan Smith, the former chief technology officer of the United States, put it. Despite the efforts to change, deceptive political ads are still widespread on Facebook and Instagram, ProPublica reported this week. Meta’s “enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations,” Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Since the 2016 and 2020 elections, the political reach of both X and TikTok have grown. A recent Washington Post analysis of X published this week found that Republican leaders are gaining followers and going viral more often since Musk took over the platform. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that newly created X accounts were often fed political content, even if they signed up looking for other topics, and that content leaned more heavily toward pro-Trump sentiments. (X did not respond to a request to comment on this story.) Meanwhile, half of the 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed by the Pew Research Center saying they watch political content on TikTok. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment for this story but directed me to a webpage that says TikTok’s policy is to label “unverified election claims, make them ineligible for recommendation, and prompt people to reconsider before sharing them.”
The overconfident rhetoric isn’t just polarizing; it could have more dangerous implications. “If one side is expecting the race to be a blowout and the other side wins, that sort of lays the groundwork for broad support for challenging the results,” says Sol Messing, a research associate professor at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics. (Messing previously worked for Twitter but says he volunteered to be laid off when Musk bought the platform in 2022, and he refused severance to avoid signing a non-disparagement agreement.) “Parts of this may reflect this broader, far-right strategy,” he added.
On X, there is now an Election Integrity Community, launched by Musk’s America PAC in late October. Here, people are encouraged to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election” — sightings they would typically report to official government agencies for investigation. Many of the recent posts show clear support for Trump in their claims of voting fraud and interference: On Thursday, one user posted photos of what appeared to be Ohio voting ballots with Trump’s name misprinted. Election officials, however, say they have not seen such ballots.
While Trump has repeatedly said that the only way he’d lose is through election fraud, many posts from candidates and their famous endorsers don’t express the same swaggering confidence we see across feeds. Ads for Harris on Instagram implore people to get to the polls and donate more money, calling it “an all-hands-on-deck moment.” Michelle Obama says the race “is too close,” and “we have to give it everything we’ve got.” And even Trump is back to posting on X, urging people to vote early — a shift from 2020, when he demonized mail-in voting.
No one on social media has the answer to what will happen in Tuesday’s election. Anxiously reposting or liking election content may feel like the only thing we can do as the clock ticks down. “We know it’s a period of really high anxiety,” says Literat. “This is definitely shaped by the context. But it’s also that content that really offers certainty or that resonates with hope or with fears that’s spread more rapidly, too.” For now, the best way to alleviate that anxiety might be to get off social media until Tuesday passes.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
