The aftermath of the 2024 election has been a media firestorm. You’ve seen Kamala Harris supporters lamenting the outcome all over X. However, for a Gen Zer, far more intolerable has been the barrage of Instagram reposts from friends, peers and classmates. They’re not original, well-thought-out explanations of Trump’s flaws. They’re oversimplifications of the day’s issues with an obvious leftward lean.
Welcome to the Generation Z social media echo chamber, where a startling number of young adults get the bulk of their news. This has created the perception among some Gen Zers that everyone thinks as they do, brainwashing an entire subset of the population to respond exclusively to emotional appeals.
Let’s start with @wetheurban, the largest of these accounts, with more than 7 million followers.
Immediately after the election, the account posted a flurry of statements, all thinly veiled implications that Donald Trump’s election was a grievous blow to abortion rights. One such affirmation was titled “To Women Everywhere that are Tired of Being Strong All the Time.” Never mind that Trump has publicly stated that he would veto a national abortion ban, and that abortion remains legal in 21 states, @wetheurban’s devoted fanbase is unlikely to be made aware of that fact.
Especially since the comments on this post have been turned off.
This is an example of the stranglehold these accounts have on my generation. Notoriously short attention spans and bleeding-heart empathy mean that once the “vibe” is there, everything else is tuned out. Any information to the contrary is dismissed as “sexist,” “racist” and the like. We all know the drill.
Another such offender is snarkily called @s***youshouldcareabout. This charming account posted that “supporting a convicted felon over a woman is ******* insane” soon after the election was called. The post was immediately liked by hundreds of thousands, echoing the idea that this election came down to one category: gender.
It’s ironic, then, that this oversimplification of those who hold heterodox views is what brought Trump his victory.
For years, outlets have pushed the idea that Trump supporters are vile racists and fascists in disguise. It doesn’t seem that this narrative stuck — in fact, Trump outperformed among Latino and Black voters because the Democratic Party focused on intersectionality instead of the issues that cut across race: economic health, parent’s rights, the flow of drugs at the southern border, and peace through strength. Working-class, family-oriented Americans were sneered at, and Trump is a symptom of that, not the cause.
The problem with these accounts isn’t that they’re anti-Trump — it’s that they have bred a kind of banal oversimplification of the issues, brainwashing a generation to respond to emotional appeals alone. These influencers are an outrage machine, feeding off a generation that values performative empathy.
Even worse, they’ve created the perception that the only acceptable positions to hold are left wing, and that everyone in polite society agrees with them — hence, the patronizing tone of many of these posts. It’s true these posts have some pull: The posts mentioned above received 1.2 million and 550,000 likes respectively.
What’s also true is that 5 million more Americans voted for Trump than they did for Harris. Makes the echo chamber look more like an echo shoebox.
So, my call to my generation is this: Stop the sneer. Not everyone thinks like you. If you were unhappy with the election results, maybe you should talk to a Trump supporter and see what their perspective is. Break free from the echo chamber, think for yourself, and embrace a little nuance.
