Jordan Feldman found out that President Biden was ending his campaign for a second term from Liza Minnelli.
Well, kind of. Ms. Feldman, a 29-year-old retail worker who lives in Philadelphia, got the news via @LiZaOutlives, an unofficial X account that is not affiliated with Ms. Minnelli and regularly posts macabre updates about things and people she has outlived. (Ms. Minnelli has said through her manager that she is not a fan of the account.)
In this case, it was Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign that she had outlasted. The post appeared four minutes after Mr. Biden shared the letter announcing his decision on X.
“I get push notifications from them because they break news so quickly,” Ms. Feldman said. She started following the account after Larry King’s death in 2021 and decided to turn on its push notifications (receiving an alert any time the account posts) after James P. Spears was removed as his daughter Britney Spears’s conservator.
Ms. Feldman said she saw the meme account’s post before reports from major news outlets, adding that her friends did not believe her when she told them Mr. Biden was out of the race.
“We couldn’t find anything,” she said. “I was like, ‘It’s the truth! I know it’s true because @LiZaOutlives would not lie to me.’”
Ms. Feldman is one of many who got the news from an unexpected online source, highlighting a shift in the way many Americans consume news media. While plenty of people learned about Mr. Biden withdrawing from the race from push alerts, email newsletters and cable television, in an increasingly social media-dominated world other sources can beat them to the punch. Pew Research Center has found that about one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds say they regularly get their news from TikTok.
As people, particularly younger generations, treat social media platforms like TikTok as search engines, less traditional options, like meme accounts or content creators, are becoming a core part of the media landscape. Accounts like these are rarely beholden to the same standards and scrutiny as mainstream media outlets — and the creators who run them can move quickly, regardless of accuracy.
Allie Weill, a science writer in Sacramento, was participating in an online crossword competition on Sunday when the president made his announcement.
“In the middle of the tournament, people started posting the news about Biden in the chat,” Ms. Weill, 35, said in a direct message on X. “At least one person posted in a very fitting way; something along the lines of ‘former presidential candidate (5).’ Like you would write a crossword clue for a five-letter answer.”
Tina Wargo, 31, learned of the shake-up from a text inviting her to a party. “It’s Joever,” read the event name, said Ms. Wargo, who lives in Brooklyn and works for a theater ticketing company. She initially thought it was a joke, but was surprised to learn otherwise after seeing posts from Taylor Swift-related accounts on X using the same pun. (An ex-boyfriend of Ms. Swift’s shares a first name with the president.)
Elsewhere online, some people learned the news from meme accounts devoted to esoteric subjects, like a parody account of an American Girl doll.
Pranav Malhotra, a communications professor at the University of Michigan, said a post from the pop culture news account @PopCrave broke the Biden news to him on Sunday. He was not surprised that he learned of the development from such a source, given how political discourse has evolved to be digital and meme-oriented in recent years, he said. (Before suspending his campaign, Mr. Biden’s team posted a job listing for a meme manager. Republican candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump, have also deployed memes as an effective strategy.)
Each social media platform has a specific language to it, Mr. Malhotra, 33, said. “Over the years, how people talk about politics has gotten embedded within that logic and within those norms,” Mr. Malhotra added.
Omy Melo, a 32-year-old video editor who lives in Queens, heard Mr. Biden was leaving the race from a Discord server devoted to the videogame “World of Warcraft.” Another user posted a screenshot of the president’s announcement letter to the server. Like Ms. Wargo, Mr. Melo believed the post was a joke. “I thought it was a meme at first,” he said.
After checking Mr. Biden’s post on X and confirming that the letter was real, Mr. Melo informed his wife, Jessica. Ms. Melo, also 32 and a nonprofit worker, said her first stop was a Reddit page devoted to “Emoji Pasta.”
Emoji pasta, better known as copypasta, is a type of internet message intended to be copied and pasted and shared over and over, like “the chain letters you’d get in your email in the ’90s and 2000s,” Ms. Melo explained.
The messages are known for being vulgar and for making liberal use of suggestive emoji, like the eggplant.
“They were up instantly,” Ms. Melo said, referring to the emoji pasta about the president’s announcement. She quickly forwarded the explicit messages to several friends who told her that this was how they had learned the news.
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