We tested one of the media's favorite economic theories
Stop blaming social media for the vibecession
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The Biden economy was largely defined by a divergence between consumer sentiment and traditional economic indicators. This “vibecession” sparked an incredible amount of economic discourse, analysis, and denial from a host of experts and commentators alike.
The core argument was that even though large swaths of Americans said that the economy was bad, it was actually totally fine. Anyone who felt otherwise, according to many vibecession proponents, was mostly being influenced by gloomy headlines propagated by social media platforms like TikTok.
“The proximate cause of the [general] malaise is ultimately just ‘TikTok’” wrote political commentator Will Stancil, who is perhaps the most strident advocate of the social media theory for bad vibes.
At The Argument, we’ve been tracking both media consumption and voter sentiment for the last nine months. With more than 15,000 individual poll responses from voters across America, we were able to assemble incredibly detailed pictures of platform-level ideologies and sentiment across a host of different issues.
In all of that data, I have yet to see anything indicating that the vibecession is — or was — a TikTok-driven phenomenon.
In our March survey, we actually asked people a battery of questions about how they viewed the economy today compared to 25 years ago. When it came to quality of life indicators like “taking a vacation,” “buying a house,” or “raising children,” virtually everyone agreed that the economy is worse today than it was in 2001.
Here’s the interesting part, though: The least pessimistic groups were the voters who got their news from social media and cable television. In every single question, those who consumed information from TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), or cable television were actually slightly more optimistic than other voters were.1
This just doesn’t line up with the social media model of the vibecession theory: If social media algorithms and short-form headlines were driving this depressive sentiment, then users who get their news from X, TikTok, and Instagram would be more pessimistic. Yet we see no evidence of this.
It’s worth noting that though almost all social media platforms skew young, their users are not at all similar in partisanship. For example, X is predominantly right-wing, while Instagram and TikTok are overwhelmingly left-leaning. Yet, when it comes to the economy, these users are all more optimistic than people who get their news from newspapers and news websites, broadcast television, and local television — all media that skew older and more educated.2
But perhaps media diet does matter, we’re just not seeing it here — maybe the effect is real, it’s just being drowned out by more important factors like age. Luckily, we can get more sophisticated with our analysis:
We built a regression model on our polling microdata, specifically designed to isolate the effect social media had on a respondent’s perception of the economy. We controlled for race, party ID, gender, age, income, and whether someone consumed news on social media or not.
In this more sophisticated model, we still consistently see that social media has no effect whatsoever on a person’s perception of the economy — which holds whether comparing economic conditions to 2001 or 2021. Party, race, and age can claim significant effects, but after controlling for them, social media’s effect is statistically insignificant.
So, can we really say the vibecession is an artifact of social media? I don’t think so. If negative economic sentiment were driven by people seeing negative headlines on TikTok, then we probably would see something quite different in the polling data.
What’s causing the vibecession, if not social media? After all, Kyla Scanlon wasn’t hallucinating — consumer sentiment in the post-pandemic period really did become completely detached from economic “fundamentals” in an unprecedented manner. And it’s never really recovered.
Some of this is almost certainly due to a sharp increase in inflation itself. After all, we have evidence to suggest that people separate wage increases from price increases, attributing the former to their own hard work and the latter to a policy failure.
But the story would be incomplete without Matt Darling’s astute observation: “the population that sees the biggest difference between predicted and actual sentiment is the upper- and middle-classes; not the poor.”
My read is that the vibecession was likely magnified in cultural discourse because it was felt most intensely among the higher-income households.
This is because the pandemic actually saw a reduction in wage inequality, with lower-income households seeing the largest income increases. As David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew have shown, rapid wage growth among lower income workers outpaced inflation, but high-wage workers (top 10%) did relatively worse because their salaries grew slower than inflation.
Inflation hit everyone, which resulted in widespread economic pessimism. But, as Darling noted, the shocks were especially magnified among services that relied on low-cost labor — particularly services that higher-income households had become accustomed to. This explains why the vibecession gained even more traction: It was especially sharp among the upper class that traditionally tends to shape discourse in this country.
Darling’s thesis is the first compelling explanation I’ve seen for the vibecession. Importantly, it is not rooted in “social media vibes.” Instead, it provides a real, coherent explanation rooted in material cost increases, and it is not centered around baseless chatter on TikTok acting as a social contagion on the economy.
What surprises me, though, is how comparatively little attention this theory has gotten, especially compared to the focus on other hypotheses. For instance, The New York Times wrote an entire long-form piece on how TikTok was exacerbating Biden’s cost-of-living crisis. Business Insider similarly uplifted Stancil’s thesis on the vibecession being a social phenomenon, driven in part by platforms like TikTok.
If we are going to argue that the vibecession was fueled by people’s social media feeds, then the data needs to actually support that idea. Instead, after controlling for the demographics and partisanship of respondents, there is simply no correlation between media consumption and economic sentiment.
The “messenger class” strikes again
To an extent, I think the traction that the TikTok theory got among cultural elites illustrates a breakdown in shared reality. As The Argument Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas wrote, the “messenger class” is systematically different from most Americans, yet assumes its experiences are universal. The TikTok theory is mostly just an educated guess, born out of a lack of understanding of how people actually form their opinions.
Think about who actually comprises the “cultural elite” in America. It is a group that overwhelmingly skews white, liberal, and college-educated, and it is far more likely to live in a few deep-blue urban cores. This is a relatively small chunk of American society that does not consume the same information or prioritize the same things as the rest of America does.
As just one example, white, college-educated voters who backed Kamala Harris in 2024 named “democracy” as a top issue, making them one of the only groups in America to prioritize anything over the cost of living.
Is it really a surprise that this group had a hard time understanding the way the country actually thinks? When they’re trying to explain why Americans may feel a certain way, they’re likely just guessing.
My point here isn’t to scold anyone.3 It’s simply to point out that the “TikTok vibecession” discourse is backwards, and it originated among a group of people who have very little in common with the average American voter.
We see evidence of this divide again and again in our polling data. And it’s consistent with how both parties have behaved in the White House, with staffers and presidents praising the economy in front of an unreceptive electorate furious at the rising cost of living. People were — and still are — genuinely upset about the economy for material reasons, not because they were seeing posts on social media.
The failure of Joe Biden to actually do anything about this doomed his presidency and brought his predecessor back to power. The failure of Donald Trump to deliver on this promise has made him one of the most unpopular presidents in the modern era, and it may well lead to the Republican Party blowing a generational advantage in both the House and the Senate.
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