Inside the Democrats’ Struggle to Win Over Creators
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In early March, a group of liberal influencers showed up at the Capitol for Trump's joint address to congress. They were brought by Chorus, a new nonprofit founded to facilitate connections between Democrat lawmakers and independent influencers. The goal was to get the creators to create content promoting Democratic messaging.
The event was marketed to creators as an opportunity to interview members of congress. When they showed up, however, it became apparent that Chorus hadn't actually booked interviews for anyone aside from Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal YouTuber and co-founder of Chorus.
"It was essentially, go to the Rayburn building and go trick or treating for interviews," one creator who attended the event said. "It was so embarrassing and it didn't put us in the position to make good content."
After knocking on the doors of lawmakers' offices unannounced, creators were able to secure some decent content. Collectively, the group’s content generated over 53 million views. But afterwards, they were asked to submit the content they created to Chorus in order to get their travel costs reimbursed. No creators were paid for the content they made. This irked the creators, who felt like Chorus now wanted to use their content to put into a deck in order to show the Democrats who hired Chorus how successful their activation was. When in reality, the creators say they received little to no support.