The big lesson coming out of the 2020 Dem primary is that social media does not provide an accurate picture of the electorate. It's a hall of mirrors that has a tendency to exaggerate support for fringe candidates and magnify weak attacks into sick burns.
The distortion effect of social media is greatly magnified by the influence it holds over legacy media, which itself long ago ceased to represent the electorate accurately. To put it simply, journalists spend WAY too much time on Twitter looking for easy clickbait "news."
Legacy media still does shoe-leather political reporting, but they mix a LOT of fast food from social media into their information diet. Their precious "narratives" are heavily influenced by Facebook and Twitter. They're attracted to social media "energy" like moths to flame.
This is one reason Bernie Sanders looked all but unstoppable to the media, even though a lot of legacy media orgs didn't like him. It's most noticeable in the media fascination with Warren, who is practically an asterisk out in the real world but looked huge on social media.
Social media isn't always wrong about candidates, and it's probably true that successful campaigns are now difficult to pull off without a decent online presence, but it's too easy to forget that real-world still matters more. Social media magnifies and distorts passion.
That's especially true of the "youth vote," which tended to be chimerical even before social media came along. The image projected by young people online is very different from what they will actually do on Election Day, in terms of both turnout and how they vote.
Of course legacy media loves the social media funhouse-mirror reflection of politics precisely because it IS a funhouse. It's so much more volatile, fast-moving, and dramatic than what's really happening on the ground. Shock polls! Sudden reversals! Stock market gyrations!
The thing you have to remember about social media, its defining attribute, is that it's EASY. Instant input, instant output, zero cost, zero effort. Anything that requires even the tiniest bit of effort, with even the smallest dollop of consequences, will go very differently.
Which demonstrates something a lot of people in politics don't want to admit: the difficulty of voting, even when it's made very easy, influences the outcome. We would live in a very different world if we had one-click online voting, no matter how secure it was. /end
