The US presidential election has finally started in earnest and it's already made a huge impact on social platforms. Former President Donald Trump, who seemed like the front-runner until very recently, had 87 million followers on X and over 24 million on Instagram a month ago, while Vice President Kamala Harris had roughly 18 million X followers and 17 million on Instagram. But those numbers, just like the election itself, have shifted dramatically in the past few weeks. If the most recent social data is anything to go by, the Trump campaign is in serious trouble.

According to monthly Facebook data that Garbage Day has been collecting from NewsWhip, a link to Harris' ActBlue donation page was the most-interacted-with third-party link on the platform in July. This is a jaw-dropping stat for several reasons — the first being that Harris didn't announce her campaign until July 21. But it's an even bigger deal when you put it in context.

We've been tracking Facebook activity around pages, posts, and links for over a year now. Harris' ActBlue link is only one of two we've seen in that time crack a million interactions (the other being a Daily Mail story about actor Danny Trejo's sobriety last August). Harris' link was also more visited than Facebook's most popular publisher, Catholic Fundamentalism, the viral powerhouse that’s dominated the platform for the better part of a year.

Harris is also beating Trump when it comes to official pages. Hers grew by about 400,000 new followers after her announcement, while Trump’s increased by only 250,000 followers across all of July, with 130,000 of those coming after his attempted assassination on July 13.

Harris is trouncing Trump on Instagram as well. Her main Instagram page was the fourth-most-followed account on the app for the month of July, gaining 2.3 million new followers after Harris announced her campaign. Meanwhile, Trump was the ninth-most-followed account, gaining only about 750,000 followers post-assassination attempt. For comparison, artist Sabrina Carpenter is doing better than Trump on Instagram. 

The only place Trump is outperforming Harris is in TikTok hashtags. But if you dig into the data, things aren't exactly positive for his campaign. 

TikTok, particularly at the highest levels of activity, is not an especially political place. For instance, in February, two of the top videos on the platform were of chocolate-covered strawberries. This is likely why the Harris campaign's embrace of Brat Summer has been so effective — it’s as meme-y and cultural as it is political. Her campaign-related videos can now bypass TikTok's filters around news content and have international appeal. So it was surprising to see that the biggest political hashtag on the app in July wasn't anything to do with Harris: it was #trump, but not because he's necessarily more popular on the platform.

The #trump hashtag was used in over half a million TikTok videos in July, just behind hashtags connected to the Olympics and the Fourth of July. Before you write off TikTok as a Republican stronghold, you need to take into account how and when the hashtag was used. According to TikTok’s analytics, all the attention arrived after July 13. Over the next two days, use of the hashtag increased by roughly seven times, trailing off over the next few days despite the Republican National Convention. Other conservative hashtags like #trump2024 and #maga followed similar trends, growing six or seven times in the 48 hours following the assassination attempt and then reverting closer to the mean after a few days. Essentially, after Trump was shot, there was a burst of TikTok activity that (mostly) faded away.

Since January, TikTok has offered public analytics for only a short list of hashtags and topics, tightening what advertisers and researchers can see, likely in response to government scrutiny. Because it prioritizes hashtags that’ve been popular for longer, that means we don’t have data for hashtags related to Harris. But we did find that hashtags like #biden, which was used in over 200,000 videos in July, and #democrats also peaked in interest following Trump’s assassination attempt. Unlike Trump-related hashtags, they had a second jump a week later after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. We saw similar patterns for other election-related hashtags, as well.

According to a June Pew Research report, most on TikTok don’t go there for news but likely end up seeing it. And they’re more likely to see opinions or jokes about news than the news itself — TikTok users are not especially interested in politics, but if something unusual happens, they tune in. In what must have been a crushing blow for the Trump campaign, Harris entering the race was simply more interesting than Trump's appointment of Ohio Sen. JD Vance to his presidential ticket. In fact, according to numbers we've seen, no one outside of X even noticed.

Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate on July 15. In the next two weeks, he gained over 1.1 million followers on X, up about 200% from where he was previously. He saw the second-highest percentage growth of any large X account over that time except for a Telegram blockchain game called “Dogs Community.”

Trump is also not doing so well on X — or at least not as well as he should be. Despite the former president’s commitment to Truth Social, Elon Musk has publicly endorsed Trump and restored his X account after it was suspended for over a year following the January 6 insurrection. Trump gained over a million followers in July, but just as we saw on TikTok, many of these followers were not joining because of Vance or even in defiance of Harris entering the race. More than 300,000 of these new followers came within two days of the assassination attempt.

Harris' X account, though, increased by nearly the same number, and one could argue she actually grew by a larger rate than Trump when you factor in her campaign’s rapid-response account, @KamalaHQ, which was rebranded from @BidenHQ. Both Harris accounts saw about 800,000 new followers in the week after her announcement.

This is especially bad for Trump considering how firmly Musk has his thumb on the scales when it comes to what accounts can do well on X. Even if Trump is solidly committed to Truth Social, his base is all in on X. Pew’s report found that Democratic X users are less likely to trust the news they see on X, and the platform in general, than they were before Musk’s takeover. X has been accused of rate-limiting Harris' account, and briefly suspended the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising group last week. Even when the platform is rigged in Trump's favor, he's still not dominating.

Meanwhile, in the 24 hours since Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, his following on X increased by 50%. Again, to put that in context, Vance gained 60% in the first 24 hours after his announcement, and he started with about twice as many followers. Like Harris, however, Walz grew much faster on Instagram, with his follower count increasing over 140% in 24 hours.

The takeaway: if you look at social media as a whole, Harris and now Walz are dominating the conversation. Trump is still on top on X but not as comfortably as he should be if you account for Musk's alleged meddling. Which, at least at this point in the election, puts things into an interesting binary. Can X, even in its chaotic state, be influential enough to throw an election? Or have conservatives bet on the wrong filter bubble?

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.