“They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats,” students quote. Biden falling down the stairs is referenced over and over again. At one point or another, most people have seen viral video clips about America’s presidential nominees messing up. Campaigns take advantage of their opposing candidates’ clips in their ads, which isn’t a new thing but has become increasingly popular.
Donald Lober, a social studies teacher, knows that there’s always been attack ads regardless of the circumstance. “But how [our nominees] reach their audiences has certainly changed,” Lober said.
Especially in a world that’s more complex than black and white — rather, ripe with different shades of gray — shorter clips can worsen polarization when they don’t provide context.
Senior Carter Berg agreed that these videos often select words and actions that don’t encompass the bigger picture.
“It can take you away from what they’re actually trying to say. And if you look at debates, speeches, rallies, [speakers] tend to go for more of those clippable one-liners that go viral,” Berg said.
Lober recounts seeing barely any positive coverage in viral clips, and Montana Lopez-Brown, another senior, has seen hundreds of negative videos yet barely any positive ones.
But are all viral clips of America’s nominees harmful? Unfortunately, a lot of those negative videos can be. Lopez-Brown takes caution against viral clips because of how easily they can be staged or just misinformation. “I feel like there’s such a high saturation of those videos. Even if they’re complete misinformation, people are going to see it and run with it because not everyone has media literacy,” Lopez-Brown said. Media literacy, the ability to recognize different types of media and know what messages they’re sending, has become increasingly important in recent years.
“You should be [looking at] a lot of things to shape your opinions,” Lober said, “but [clips] are better than nothing at all.”
Lopez-Brown sees a significance in certain videos as well.
“I do think that if they’re coming straight from verified sources that they could help,” Lopez-Brown said. Still, increasing polarization and echo chambers fostered on social media can make it difficult for presidential candidates to send a positive message.
Berg has actually uninstalled some social media apps partially due to the echo chamber they create.
“Because your social media will feed you clips that you want to see,” Berg said, “it creates an echo of stuff that you want.”
To keep their users engaged, most apps will send them exactly that. More user engagement equals more money, and money keeps people afloat. However, the circulation of one singular side to a person can polarize them against the other side. If someone is Republican their apps may feed them positive Trump coverage and negative Harris coverage, and if someone’s Democrat then it’s more likely to be the other way around.
“I see it in my family a lot: they tend to leap to more of an extreme and not be able to see other opinions,” Berg said.
With the high volume of misinformation on the internet, popular clips of this election’s candidates can cause a measurable amount of harm—but in the golden age of social media, they’re hard to avoid. It underscores the growing importance of media literacy and pulling information from strong sources, particularly during a general election.
“If you take a speech from a candidate 20 minutes in length and get a 30-second clip, then what was lost? It’s hard to have nuanced opinions,” Lober said. “It’s so black and white and these [viral videos] are without context. Sometimes the issues are more complex than that.”
