After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators have become part of mainstream political media this year, delivering election news, analysis, and political commentary to their online fans—all while eschewing traditional the press.

Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden was serenaded by the camera the happy shaking TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders rages for Kamala Harris in a Twitch stream cohosted by an anime catboy VTuber. Donald Trump has teamed up with the quintessential creator brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of making time for traditional sit-down interviews with the mainstream press, Harris and Trump relied on creators to shore up votes and spread their campaign messages.

“There’s no value – as far as my colleagues in the mainstream press – in a general election to talk to The New York Times or talk to The Washington Post, because those (readers) are already with us,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Harris, told Semafor in December.

The influence grew to a $250 billion industry. More than 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they follow an influencer on social media, a A Pew Research survey found last year. A recent survey, published in Novemberfound that one in five US adults get their news from news influencers. That shift in media consumption has been met with record spending on creative partnerships. USA priorities put at least $1 million into influencer marketing. Harris’s campaign paid at least $2.5 million of management agencies that book creators for political advertising campaigns.

This election, creators are everywhere—the Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, rallies, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations for this creative take on the political message were laid nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Trump showed how social media platforms like Twitter can influence voters. Throughout the 2020 election, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on the presidential campaign which recruited influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates, and the Biden administration often invited creators to the White House for briefings.

By embracing creators, politicians are beginning to blur the lines between talking heads and journalists. Unlike journalists, newsmakers are often not met with editorial standards and adequate fact-checking—something a high-profile defamation case is far from changing but, currently, marked a difference. Many creators work in the same way that journalists do—absorbing, translating, and communicating news to online audiences. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them have become fans rather than objective observers. Some are clearly party activists. However, they are always given access similar to what captured by the traditional press.