Illustration by Charlie Wang

On July 21, 2024, pop singer Charli XCX posted on X saying “kamala IS brat.” The internet went wild with edits, memes, TikTok sounds, and trends, causing an explosion of attention around the new presidential candidate. In turn, the Harris campaign embraced the endorsement with small moves like temporarily changing the @KamalaHQ X banner to match the format of the “brat” album cover. 

As a sociology major who is constantly thinking cynically about public relations and the way famous people market themselves, I’m bound to be hyperaware and hypercritical of these topics. This interaction is fun and lighthearted, but it could indirectly contribute to an audience without critical media literacy voting in an uninformed way.

Other relatively superficial appeals to young voters have led to campaign successes in the past; for example, John F. Kennedy’s generally-agreed-upon attractiveness made a significant impact on voter perception of his first-ever televised debate against Nixon. Actual celebrity endorsements have, of course, also contributed to a presidential win, as many believe Taylor Swift’s Joe Biden cookies did in 2020.

A reciprocal interaction between political and pop culture figures with this level of social media engagement, however, is unprecedented. Social media’s increasingly major role has considerable implications for the ways young adults interact with and make decisions about politics and voting; it can increase the visibility and accessibility of information, but with that accessibility comes a flood of unimportant information as well.

Some believe that any tactic that encourages young people to learn about candidates and perform their civic duty, including linking pop culture and politics, results in a net positive. This increase in youth civic engagement is necessary, as older voters show up to the polls much more consistently than do their younger counterparts. Plus, in the wake of Joe Biden’s time spent as the 2024 Democratic Party presidential candidate, the Democratic party is certainly incentivized to reverse the public perception of them as decrepit and old. What better vehicle to appeal to disengaged young people than one of the most popular albums of the summer?

It’s no secret that the current political landscape discourages and disappoints most people our age, constantly bombarded by doom and gloom on the news and social media. Many of us feel disempowered to make any difference in the United States government and the social systems it oversees. At a certain point of looming dread and loss of control, it’s easy to disengage with the election. The cost of investing time and energy into researching current events, candidates, and policies can seem disproportional to the hypothetical benefit. 

But when this begins manifesting in an influx of unserious internet content surrounding a very serious situation (which is quite literally life or death for some people), the consequences can run deeper than a few individual losses. 

Sure, politics has been turned into meme content for over a decade, especially around presidential elections. (I’d argue that old political cartoons were the equivalent pre-memes.) There’s no foreseeable end to that phenomenon. But a dance to a Trump soundbite turned song, “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats…,” is a completely different beast. A racist comment about Haitian immigrants simply becomes another joke on TikTok or Instagram reels because we don’t know how else to cope. Overexposure to ridiculously prejudiced statements causes us to forget the institutional discrimination backing those statements.

Political engagement via pop culture is alluring when we are too tired and scared to engage in more meaningful ways. Breaking down complex issues into humorous posts that take advantage of a popular commodity — because music is a product that requires marketing just like any other thing being sold —makes it easy to understand and strips it of emotionally exhausting elements.

Are we critically reading this content, though? Is it really true that anything that gets young people to vote is a good thing? I worry that this disengaged, recreational engagement gives political figures the opportunity to capitalize on young people’s exhaustion without doing anything positive for their citizens. I worry that those citizens won’t recognize that in the depths of the internet’s meme-ification of every interview and debate.

Maybe people aren’t planning to vote for Kamala in November just because Charli XCX mentioned her once, but at what point could someone’s political world become so saturated with celebrity culture, Instagram posts, and TikTok trends that it’s hardly based on the actual campaign anymore?

Though it may not color a person’s whole worldview, I still implore my peers to step back from pop culture politics and consider the motivations behind each public figure’s actions: how much publicity does each figure gain, and what kind? Is the potential for cash (either directly as compensation or through a surge in public visibility) overriding a figure’s true values? Are a figure’s true values of interest to you, someone who does not know them personally? Answering these questions may change how interactions between public figures appear, and how much they influence their audience’s opinion.