Summary
Donald Trumpās popularity among Generation Z voters has sharply declined since the 2024 election, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.
His net favorability among 18-29-year-olds has dropped from +19 in November to -18, raising concerns for Republicans about sustaining youth support.
While Trump gained ground with young voters in 2024, recent policiesāsuch as his mass deportation plan and targeting of DEI initiativesāmay have contributed to this decline.
People donāt want to hear the truth. Look at the sales on fiction vs. non-fiction.
Thatās not a problem in most media because most of the time people are honest about whatās fiction and whatās non-fiction.
On social media, people have these para-social relationships with the people making the content that makes them want the content creators to be āauthenticā. Problem is the algorithms donāt select for actual authenticity, because people prefer fiction over reality. So instead people making content need to appear to be authentic to get the para-social juice, but give people fiction because thatās what people really want.
Adults who remember the times before social media became dominant are better equipped to understand the distinction between the fiction social media presents us from reality. To those raised on this content, whatās on social media is reality.
I really do think (fear) that may be true, and thatās probably why I go on about teaching media literacy and critical thinking (most especially spotting logical fallacies) so much.
I already think many that were around before social media were ill-equipped as-is (as an example - how many people think āreality televisionā is not heavily edited and heavily scripted? That artifice came on the scene before social media did and many were and are duped by it); I worry even more about people raised on it, many of them foolishly thinking that knowing their way around apps and certain sites makes them more āmedia-savvyā, thinking that āmy generationā just gets this like no other when itās definitely a prior generation that has handed them these things.
This kind of thinking - that your generation is somehow uniquely equipped like no other prior human beings before - is complete delusion. Itās not like this conceit is confined to gen alpha or z or whatever, either - virtually every generation has their version of it.
to be completely devils advocate here, the human mind is not a static blob of inputs and outputs, itās a variable soup of neurons with connections between different neurons as they try and establish patterns and reasons between things. People who have grown up today, compared to people who grew up 200 years ago, are quite literally fundamentally different. Every generation is raised differently to the previous, itās why every generation behaves differently to the previous generations. Itās just that the difference is less significant than most would think.
The entire reason why āpost truth societyā is even a thing now is because of this fundamental operation of human psychology, shit changes, and we change with the shit.
This is an unfair comparison, itās like taking university textbook sales and comparing it to the bible and going āclearly people donāt want science and data!ā
To be fair, it is probably a true statement, if you were to analyze the content and media that people consume, itās likely to be very low in āhard factsā so i will give you that one, i just think itās an unreasonable comparison to be making.
A lot of the big sales in non-fiction (at least the heavily fact valued ones) are going to be books about like, psychology, sociology, math, science, biology, the one weird guy who wrote 20 books on trains because he has an extremely bizarre knowledge based on like three specific trains in general, probably a book about a plane as well, because why not. And a handful of other boring educational books, shit like cookbooks, machining, manufacturing, etcā¦
Iām not sure how much ābased on a true storyā bleeds into non-fiction, but iām basing on a strict separator so.
and to be fair, thatās because it literally is, modern social life has moved to social media, people are lonelier than ever, thereās a reason for it.