Disappointment Looks Different This Time Around

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Disappointment Looks Different This Time Around

In 2016, social media was awash in calls to protest the day after Donald J. Trump’s victory. On Wednesday, many said it seemed like business as usual.

On platforms like Instagram and X, some social media users are noticing less overtly political content and fewer calls to action in response to the election results — a stark difference from the last time Donald J. Trump was elected.Credit...Emily Elconin for The New York Times

By Madison Malone Kircher

Nov. 7, 2024

“My feed feels like a funeral,” Julie Mayer, 35, said on Wednesday afternoon, before Vice President Kamala Harris made her speech conceding the election to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Ms. Mayer, a lawyer in Philadelphia, said the online reaction to the election results felt different from the last time Mr. Trump won the presidency. Though many of the key elements are the same — a female Democratic nominee losing to Mr. Trump — Ms. Mayer said that many of the other Democrats she follows on social media seemed to be experiencing a “stunned, quiet and somber feeling” rather than the “frenzied shock” of 2016.

“Last time around there was the immediate call to action” Ms. Mayer said, referring to the Women’s March, the mass demonstration that took place the day after Inauguration Day in 2017 but had its planning begin as the 2016 election results rolled in. “This time around, it’s sort of just a resigned feeling.”

In interviews, multiple social media users said they were surprised by how quiet their feeds seemed on Wednesday, with some users posting the sorts of things they would share on a typical day: Brands advertised sales and new arrivals, influencers uploaded sponsored content and friends and family shared photos of everyday life.

Social media algorithms can place users in small bubbles of online content, making what one person sees on their feed vastly different from what another person sees. But some who remember the anti-Trump protests in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election — many of which were organized online or at least amplified there — say calls to action seem curiously absent on social media.

Sierra, a 30-year-old who lives in Washington and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, said she ran out of Instagram stories to watch, which was not the norm for her feed. “It feels as though people are in a waiting pattern for some clarity — waiting for someone to tell them what to do,” she said.

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In 2016, some anti-Trump voters flocked to social media to organize actions, including demonstrations in the immediate aftermath of the election and protests around the inauguration, like the Women’s March.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Some users, including Sierra and Ms. Mayer, remarked that they were seeing a handful of the same posts circulating among those mourning Ms. Harris’s defeat, like a post from the musician Ethel Cain, poems by Mary Oliver and Cole Arthur Riley, and an infographic from the media company Black Enterprise detailing the breakdown of voters in the election by race and gender.

Willie Greene, an author and the creator of “We The Urban,” an Instagram account that shares affirmations, wrote one of Wednesday’s viral posts, which was a set of blue text slides addressed “to women everywhere.” The post has since been liked over a million times and viewed over 70 million times, said Mr. Greene, who is 30 and lives in Los Angeles.

He too described a sense of “collective fatigue” among his following.

“I’ve seen posts from multiple people I follow, people who are like, ‘I literally used to have so much to say, and I have nothing. I got nothing today,’” he said, adding that he hoped his words might offer “clarity within all the noise.”

Aishwarya Mitra, a chemical engineering graduate student at Columbia University, said her feeds felt divided between “pessimistic and cynical” posts from Democrats and posts with a more “I told you so” tone from more progressive and leftist people she follows online.

The low-key responses she noticed online felt like “an overcorrection for what happened on Jan. 6,” Ms. Mitra, 23, added, explaining that supporters of Ms. Harris, while displeased with the outcome, seemed committed to a peaceful power transition and reluctant to stir unrest. (Some posts making the rounds, however, sought to apportion blame to different voter blocs that broke from the Democratic coalition for Mr. Trump.)The shape of Mr. Trump’s victory in this election may also be affecting the response online. While supporters of Hillary Clinton rallied behind her significant popular vote win in 2016, Mr. Trump’s resounding defeat of Ms. Harris means Democrats online do not have that same energy to galvanize them.

Some posts online seem to acknowledge the results of the election only implicitly and avoided making mention of Mr. Trump. Among them are calls to followers to seek out community groups and mutual aid opportunities, renew passports, stock up on emergency contraception and reach out to crisis hotlines.

Some users faced criticism for posting about topics other than the election. Kim Kardashian, for instance, caught flak after she promoted her son’s YouTube channel on Wednesday.

In the eight years since Mr. Trump was last elected president, the climate on social media has changed more broadly. Posting online during national events has perhaps become more fraught, such as when debates arose around #blackouttuesday, a mass action on Instagram in which users posted black squares and vowed to mute themselves after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

And while X, formerly Twitter, was once a hub of discourse and viewed as a medium for grass-roots organizing, some on the left have grown more skeptical of its political potential now that the platform is owned by Elon Musk, who endorsed Mr. Trump and has remade X into a reflection of his own views.

In February, long before Election Day, some anti-Trump voters were already saying that they felt “burned out” on outrage, and on Wednesday, many said they felt disillusioned with politics and the potential to bring about change.

It’s possible that the conversations that were happening on social media in 2016 have shifted elsewhere, said Sierra, the 30-year-old from Washington. While her Instagram feed was relatively absent of overtly political content, there was one social outlet where conversations were flowing: private group chats.

“It seemed like for a long time last night, like nobody was saying anything,” she said of her chats. “Once one person sort of like breaks the seal, then everybody starts talking.”

Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture. More about Madison Malone Kircher