2024 election: Social media's influence on voter decisions

As the election approaches, social media's role in shaping voter perceptions of candidates has become increasingly significant. University of Michigan's Ross School of Business marketing professor Marcus Collins joins Wealth! to discuss the impact of social media on the upcoming election.

Collins describes social media as "the media of people," emphasizing its power to drive discourse that influences behavior. "It will be unbelievably valuable" in the election, Collins says, because through social media, we will be "collectively deciding" what's best for us as a society.

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This post was written by Angel Smith

Video Transcript

I wanna switch gears just for a hot second, Marcus.

Uh We're also in an election year and as we've discussed in the past how critical social media is in the role that it plays here.

I mean, as we're thinking about even the events of last weekend, the proliferation of misleading content and the different divisive narratives that come about how critical of a year is this not just for social media to continue being a reliable community, but also in its own importance for the outcome of the election.

Yeah, social media is the media of people, by definition, social needs people, social work, social justice, social action, social welfare, it's all about people.

So the media of people is what's driving the discourse that ultimately influences behavior.

There is no marketing more influential than us, right?

We trust people over any form of marketing, communications.

So with regards to what we watch from a streaming perspective where we're gonna vote, where we should be putting our efforts, what matters whether we're team Kendrick or team Drake, all these things are being influenced by our people.

So social media as a platform, as a technology will be, will be unbelievably valuable in every step forward because we will be collectively deciding as a community as a culture, what's acceptable for people like us.

And those things would be mediated, negotiated constructed through our discourse of social networking platforms.

All right.

And one of the major owners of one of those platforms is donating and throwing his own money into the ring as well here.

So we'll see how this all nets out Marcus Collins, who is the University of Michigan marketing professor alongside Yahoo finances Alexandra Canal.

Thank you both.