The pandemic is, of course, a major factor in the dramatic increase in time spent on social media. Stay-at-home and social distancing measures boosted engagement on social platforms, particularly in the early part of 2020, as people sought entertainment and human connection. That could have made up for any potential politics-related declines in usage that might have taken place without the pandemic bump.
But even as social media behaviors began to return to normal in the latter part of 2020, Q4 earnings reports from the major platforms indicate that engagement remained high. Why?
“Last year, there was a notable number of people who aspired to lessen their engagement on social media to get away from politics,” said Richard Tomasco Jr., vice president of Caravan Surveys at Engine Insights, part of media and marketing services company Engine. “But the public isn’t going to go backward in terms of their engagement and reliance on social platforms. They may want to, but at the end of the day, there’s just that human element that can’t be avoided.”
It’s true; despite how users may feel about it, politics, particularly divisive discourse, is one of the most reliable ways for the social platforms to generate usage and engagement. Their efforts to limit that content may end up having the unintended effect of sending their users elsewhere.
Case in point: former US President Donald Trump.
After Twitter permanently banned Trump’s account following the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, Trip Chowdhry, general manager at Global Equities Research, estimated that Twitter’s revenues and engagement would both decline by about 15%. He likened the move to reddit’s June 2020 decision to remove an unofficial subreddit dedicated to supporting Trump, which Chowdhry estimated caused a 57% decline in user engagement on the platform.
And Twitter isn’t the only social platform in danger of a so-called post-Trump slump. In a November 2020 blog post, Facebook revealed that seven of the top 10 US Pages ranked by engagement from October 23 to 29, just ahead of the election, were political in some way. Trump’s Page topped the list with 39.9 million likes, reactions, comments, and shares during that week.