Gen Z is the New Gen X (on Twitter), TikTok Tilts Trump, Conservatives Dominate Digital, & Episode 3 is Live!
Welcome to People First's Influencer Impact, your guide to creators and social media driving positive change.
Welcome to Influencer Impact’s Second Edition!
Hey! People First is back with our behind-the-scenes look at creators and social impact from the team. Here's what you'll find in the April newsletter:
Media Matters: Conservatives Dominate Online Media Ecosystem
Gen Z Loves X More Than You’d Expect
Our Third Podcast Episode is Live!
NYU Study: TikTok Boosted Trump In 2024
People First Won Best Influencer Marketing Agency in Social Impact At The Reed Awards!
March Creator Webinar Recap: Let’s Talk about DEI
Our Co-founder Ryan Davis weighs in on the Media Matters report about right-wing dominance in the online media ecosystem:
Republicans benefit from a much larger, more diverse, and far more distributed non-political media ecosystem than Democrats do.
The proposed solutions from my colleagues largely make sense, supporting progressive creators, building formal infrastructure to train them, and refining messaging strategies. However, these solutions primarily focus on openly political creators rather than the most effective ones: those who rarely discuss politics but, when they do, have a significant impact on their audiences.
To make a real difference, we need a broader approach. As Media Matters notes, it is not just conservative influencers like Turning Point USA that are shifting narratives. It is the lifestyle and entertainment creators subtly echoing their messages. "A third self-identify as nonpolitical, even though 72% of those shows were determined to be right-leaning. Instead, these shows describe themselves as comedy, entertainment, or sports, or fall into other supposedly nonpolitical categories."
We also need sustained investment across digital media, web, social, streaming, gaming, and audio. Campaigns that rely solely on Instagram or TikTok are leaving too many voters out of the conversation. Groups that overly rely on “progressive” creators are not speaking to ‘normie’ voters.
There will be many efforts to improve Democrats' digital media positioning. Let’s hope they focus on the right priorities.
When you partner with People First, you are supporting the largest creator database in social impact, with nearly 20,000 vetted users, ready to be activated with a simple notification when the right campaign arises.
Read the full Media Matters for America report here.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Ryan’s The Month In Digital!
Gen Z Is Gen X (Twitter)
By Ryan Long, Digital Media Manager
As a 23 year old Twitter user, I have a love-hate relationship with the platform. I have been a loyal twitter user since I was 13, where I tweeted my thoughts on an account which luckily stayed anonymous for the entirety of its existence. Throughout the years I continued to create and consume Tweets in various ways and had my finger on the pulse of the Internet. I have experienced major world events on Twitter. I have made friends on Twitter. And most importantly I have had countless times of priceless joy from a funny Tweet being on my timeline in a way few other apps have been able to capture.
Now in 2025 that platform is a place I don’t even recognize anymore. The dial on “engagement” has clearly been turned up and you don’t have to take my word for it, the Musk Administration has made the Twitter algorithm public so you can see for yourself. Twitter has always been a place that makes people angry. The conversational nature of the app warrants conversation that gets people to stop scrolling which favors the extreme.
I will never leave Twitter. Even if the platform turns into 10x the dumpster fire it is now, I want to see the place I once loved burn to the ground. However not everyone feels the same way. I made a list of 10 of my close friends I know who are longtime Twitter users, 6 of them have left the platform completely. Upon asking them why they left the platform, every single one of them cited Elon Musk as either the reason or one of the main reasons they left the platform. Twitter was once a place the left came together to fight injustices and felt like a place for making positive change happen, and now this feeling is gone.
My friends are overwhelmingly not alone in leaving Twitter. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are leaving Twitter and often not even joining in the first place. Pew Research had a recent research study showing that Twitter is continuing to lose ground with teens. Twitter has made unsubstantiated claims about their relevancy among Gen Z but even their stats don’t paint a promising picture for the platform. Twitter is following a similar path to Facebook, 10 years later, which has been losing ground with teens since the mid-2010. Twitter has gone from a place where young hyper-online voices gather and converse, to a place where your grandpa airs his alarming alt-right political views into the void.
Influencer Impact Episode 3: Building Progressive Creator Communities is live!
Join co-hosts Ryan Davis and Nicole Dunger in this month’s episode where we discuss how People First builds a vibrant, values-aligned creator community. We dive into the details with Val Cheney, our Director of Organizing, and Jiovanni Carrasquillo, our Senior Digital Relational Organizer, on how we manage to keep creators engaged, empowered, and ready to share the causes they care about most.
Listen now, available wherever you get your podcasts!
TikTok’s Algorithm Gave Trump a Boost in 2024
A new peer-reviewed study from researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi found that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm skewed Republican during the 2024 Presidential Election. Using hundreds of “sock puppet” accounts set in battleground states like Georgia, New York, and Texas, the study showed that accounts seeded with Republican content received about 11.5% more party-aligned content than their Democratic counterparts. Even more concerning, Democratic-leaning accounts were exposed to more right-wing content than Republican ones were to left-wing content—especially videos attacking Democrats or amplifying Trump-aligned influencers.
This asymmetry in content exposure matters because TikTok is one of the most influential platforms for voters under 30. Young voters turned out in record numbers in 2024, and many of them were getting their political news straight from their For You page. While TikTok has long denied political bias and formally bans political advertising, this study raises critical questions about how the app’s design—and perhaps its ownership—might be shaping democracy in ways we don't yet fully understand.
🏆 Big news! People First has been named Best Influencer Agency in Social Impact at the Reed Awards!
We're beyond excited to be recognized as a leader in the space.
This win is a testament to how far we've come since pioneering influencer marketing in American politics. In the past five years, we've expanded into every corner of social impact—nonprofits, advocacy, philanthropy, public health, and more.
If your organization or campaign is looking to elevate your digital strategy with the right influencers, we're here to help! Let’s connect and make an impact together. 🌟
March Creator Webinar Recap: Let’s Talk about DEI
On Wednesday, March 26, 2025, the People First Creator Community hosted a webinar engaging with creators on how we can keep DEI alive. Couldn’t make it? No worries, we’re here to recap some of the most profound moments.
thanks for this newsletter. just wanted to note that arxiv preprints aren't generally peer-reviewed yet