"Click-Bait" Politics: Traditional vs. Social Media’s Role in Stimulating Economic Pessimism in the 2024 Election

Abstract

In the lead up to the 2024 election, there was a puzzling gap between the improving objective economic indicators, and worsening subjective economic perceptions among voters. This research hypothesizes media consumption as a potential intermediary factor between these two seemingly incompatible facts. Specifically, with the rise of social media use that has incentive structures to reward sensationalist and dramatized portrayals of political information, I hypothesize that social media consumption could be linked to the economic pessimism that was ubiquitous in the lead up to the 2024 election. To this end, I conduct a LLM prompt-based sentiment analysis to quantify the differences between the neutrality, negativity, and positivity of traditional vs. social media content as it pertains to economic commentary. I find that indeed, social media–across both left and right-leaning samples–features a higher incidence of negative sentiment. I then conduct a regression analysis, based on 2024 CES Survey data, and find that reported social media consumption in the survey is strongly correlated with reported economic pessimism. This provides evidence that social media narratives have a potentially significant impact on the way citizens perceive the economy, and how they vote accordingly as a result.