Javier Milei won the most recent Argentinian presidential election by a landslide, largely thanks to the campaign run on TikTok, barely two years into his political career.
Do you believe the mass-scale, real-world influence of social media yet? Further, do you have Millennials on your board of directors to help you navigate it yet?
We spend too much time on our phones. We are narcissistic and self-obsessed. We mindlessly consume online content (AKA doom-scrolling). We are the Me, Me, Me Generation overly concerned with keeping up digital appearances. We are frivolously wasting our time.
These, and others, are common complaints about my Millennial generation, allegedly precluding us from leadership and governance roles.
Let’s consider that criticism in the following context.
On 10 December 2023, Javier Milei was inaugurated as the president of Argentina.
From academic and television celebrity to Argentina’s president in less than a few years, how did Milei gain such widespread support and ascend into power so rapidly (achieving a landslide victory in the election, no less)?
I am all for bucking traditional career trajectories but let us take a closer look at his pathway with focus on his unconventional campaign strategy.
Milei did not have traditional backers and he did not run an orthodox baby-kissing, hand-shaking operation primed for photo opportunities. Instead, he took to social media with a steady stream of provocative content specifically targeting younger Argentinian voters. We aren’t talking your run-of-the-mill, monotonous, carefully-curated spiels attempting to establish authority or trustworthiness, either – think an Argentinian-equivalent of Donald Trump in terms of bombast, wild hair, and loud, confrontational tirades. Relevantly, a material difference between those two leaders is that Milei’s public relations team weren’t recoiling in horror like Trump’s did at whichever histrionic, populist soundbite made headlines in the news that day – they were right there alongside him fuelling the fire.
Argentina is South America’s second largest economy, with critical hyperinflation exceeding 140%, and over 40% of the population living below the poverty line.
To frame the political landscape at the time of the presidential election on 22 October 2023 – Argentina is South America’s second largest economy, with critical hyperinflation exceeding 140%, and over 40% of the population living below the poverty line (INDEC 2023). Of this, one third of Argentinian voters were under the age of 29. Naturally, public sentiment amongst Argentines was generally one of great distress. At a time of chronic economic turmoil, Milei offered his radicalism as a beacon of hope by using short-form videos, memes and other satirical, deepfake propaganda which smoothly tapped into (and successfully leveraged) voter anger (Brigida and Grimberg 2023).
Milei’s shtick was to be excessively theatrical and dramatic, including [in]famously wielding a chainsaw to represent his intent to drastically cut government spending, and this is the exact style of content favoured by algorithmic platforms like TikTok. Other controversial content included proposing an organ market, abolishing abortion rights, denying climate change, vowing to ‘never’ (a bold word choice in politics) raise taxes, and insulting Pope Francis. In doing so, Milei and his inflammatory content, stoked by leveraging the networks of the influencers and prominent digital strategists he enlisted into his crusade, amassed millions of followers across Tiktok and Instagram.
Opinion on Milei’s political ideologies aside and returning focus to his rapid ascension into political power, understanding and leveraging the widescale influence available through digital means was a hugely successful strategy that undeniably contributed to his landslide victory. Some might argue that Milei(/’s campaign) demonstrated a greater ability to read Argentina’s state of play than that of his opponents, all of whom also had significantly less reach with their social media presences. Either way, Milei’s time spent on social media was far from frivolous.
This isn’t the first time social media has been leveraged in political campaigns, and it won’t be the last – it has only gotten started.
In 2020, we saw the United States presidential election campaigns prioritising digital strategies over print media for the first time. Further, we all remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving ill-harvested Facebook data and its intersection with the 2016 campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Australian Electoral Commissioner, Tom Rogers also recently discussed his views on how social media has fundamentally changed democracy (Mizen 2023).
While TikTok only achieved ubiquity over the past 5-6 years, this might as well be 1,000 years in the technology space (‘technology years’ have an even lower ratio than do ‘dog years’ to ‘calendar years’). Milei’s appointment concretes that the influence of this platform in legitimate, high-stakes operating environments cannot be ignored. It’s not just crass influencers and terrible lip-synching. Political influence powerful enough to sway a presidential election was garnered predominantly through that platform alone.
We are watching, and contributing in parallel, as history unfolds.
How can the influence of social media and the internet at large play out in a boardroom, profoundly impacting governance and strategic decision-making? Let us unpack.
Consider how challenging (not impossible, but indeed challenging) it is to learn a second language as an adult: achieving fluency across all communication modes including comprehension, reading, writing, and speaking. We know this becomes harder the older we are and takes exponential relative effort. References are lost, jokes don’t land on delivery or without explanation, slang vocabulary becomes a third language to learn, and dialects (/niche sub-cultures) compound difficulties irreparably. And even if fluency can be achieved through mental translation fast enough to keep up with a real-time conversation, it’s never quite as eloquent or natural as that of native speakers who think in the language. As a Millennial (and a first-generation “digital native” (Berger 2018)), I have watched this same paradigm unfold as my colleagues from older generations try to “learn the internet”. Let us call them digital immigrants. Some, wherein their careers have been entirely displaced, digital refugees. Millennials are the only generation who lived firmly on both sides of the advent of the internet – say, dual citizens (are you enjoying these metaphors as much as I am?). This makes us uniquely positioned to bridge understanding in ways other generations simply cannot – we can interpret up to older generations and translate down to younger ones. Natively, and without requiring conscious thought to do so.
Fellow corporate Millennials are all too familiar with the joke about our bosses earning triple and quadruple our salaries but who cannot fathom the conversion of a file format from a ‘.docx’ to a .’PDF’. If you’re reading this as a Gen X’er or a Boomer and do not understand the reference, the crux of the joke is that for us as digital natives, this task is quick and effortless. It is a 5-second job many of us are called upon to ‘help’ our older colleagues with (usually by just doing it for them). Many Millennials argue that this undermines the justification of continuing higher pay scales for seasoned staff who cannot perform basic tasks required in a modern office, but I contend that it only strengthens my argument for the need for diversity in generational, innate skillsets. In a boardroom, we digital natives are a huge asset in inherently understanding the Internet of Things – we grew up together. Above and beyond file formats, we also know the difference between generative AI and deepfakes (as well as a healthy dose of scepticism with which to discern the real from the fake and are far less susceptible to the manipulation tactics related thereto).
Does your board have digital-native Millennials to properly inform decisions impacted by social media and the Internet of Things?
If not, are you confident your board could navigate this variety and scale of disruption without us?
Disclaimer: The above article constitutes predominantly my opinion and I do not intend to represent this work as academic or scientific fact. The references cited below were reviewed during my research and preparation but are only included in case of interest.
