The biggest online political moments of 2025

2025 has been one of the most chaotic years in recent American political memory, as a stream of scandals, standoffs, and viral moments made the news cycle feel like a never‑ending scroll. From ICE raids, protests, and the Epstein files to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, every week seemed to bring a new crisis or conspiracy that consumed online attention before being replaced by the next. 

In a year defined by volatility, the internet served as a major amplifier, turning every news moment into a partisan brawl. As 2025 comes to a close, I spoke with the team at Resonate to understand which moments actually broke through online, where Americans’ attention went, and what that reveals about our politics.

If you’re unfamiliar, Resonate is a new left-of-center digital communications organization founded by a few veterans of the Center for American Progress that (among other program work) tracks and compiles data on the online political conversation. The group maintains a database of 12,000 top-performing social media accounts, both political and non-political, across all major platforms and they are able to monitor trends to determine what voices, posts, issues, and narratives are breaking through. They regularly share those insights via a daily newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. 

Resonate’s database tracks post volume, views, and engagement for posts and accounts on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Bluesky, Threads, Truth Social, and Rumble. For this report, the team filtered tens of thousands of posts and sorted them by topic. The result is the chart below, showing the political topics and moments in 2025 that generated the most engagement—likes, comments, and shares—across platforms.

According to this data, the biggest political conversation online for both right-leaning and left-leaning accounts in 2025 was immigration and ICE, which received over 2.2 billion engagements. Liberal creators and brands focused on the human consequences of the Trump administration’s enforcement actions, while right-wing creators often amplified anti-immigrant content on X. The social media feeds of millions of Americans were flooded with images and videos of immigrants being detained by masked agents, alongside local and national stories of communities affected.

“One of the biggest trends we’ve seen across topics, but particularly with ICE content, has been the increase in first-hand accounts and videos,” says Carly Evans, Director of Analytics at Resonate. “While they’re awful to watch, posts showing violent or upsetting encounters with federal agents have been going viral…These posts are emotional but highly impactful ways to shed light on the direct harms of the Trump administration, and they highlight the real people affected by these policies.”

Evans told me that four of the top-ten immigration-related posts they tracked on social media this year included clips or images of people directly interacting with ICE or in ICE custody.

After immigration, Israel & Gaza were the next biggest topics online in terms of engagement on posts across platforms. Horrific videos and imagery of Israel’s genocide continued to fill users’ feeds from both liberal and mainstream news accounts on TikTok, while right-wing accounts argued amongst themselves over conservatives’ unconditional support for Israel. 

Other major storylines generating more than a billion interactions each included protests, the government shutdown and healthcare fight, the Charlie Kirk assassination, and Elon Musk’s brief tenure as “First Buddy” in Trump’s second term—along with the rise and fall of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“While it’s true Musk was a clear lightning rod in the first few months of the year, I think part of that was novelty. He was the most obvious new element distinguishing the second Trump term from the first, which gave audiences and media of all kinds something to latch on to,” says Resonate’s Vice President of Analytics, Eric Coffin-Gould. “But there’s no real legacy there—I think DOGE was a colossal failure, and there seems to be real bitterness from some in the conservative base in that regard. In the last six months, he’s still been a prolific poster, but less of a central political figure.”

Several other flashpoints also stood out for their outsized impact. Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation and feud with the Trump administration exploded for a short time online, as did “Signalgate,” when top officials accidentally included a journalist in a private group chat. The online rise of Zohran Mamdani was another major story, driving enormous engagement across political accounts.

By contrast, some Beltway dramas never caught on with the broader public. The mini-scandal surrounding Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner dominated feeds of Democratic operatives and political reporters but failed to reach any mainstream audiences. On the right, conservatives sparred over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, but posts about Fuentes barely registered in most Americans’ social media news diets.

These various online conversations unfolded against the backdrop of Democrats’ push to strengthen their messaging and digital communications infrastructure following their 2024 election loss. On that front, there have been some bright spots.

“Democrats are increasingly learning how to capture attention on the internet, but progress is uneven. From the way they successfully made the shutdown fight about health care to Senator Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador to the recent fight picked over the military by the so-called “seditious six,” Democrats have found a stronger balance between the insider minutiae of Washington and what resonates with broader audiences online,” says Coffin-Gould. “Nobody would have predicted in January how much time Democratic lawmakers would spend talking about the Epstein Files this year, but it’s been refreshing how much they have pressed the issue on a major weakness for Trump.”

For conservatives, 2025 has been marked by infighting and petty online feuds among some of their most high-profile figures. From Trump vs. Musk to Tucker Carlson vs. Ben Shapiro—and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens vs. nearly everyone else—the right’s digital melodramas have been equal parts entertaining and exhausting.

“Infighting on the right is on the rise, and it’s creating opportunities for the left,” says Evans. “The conflict between Trump and Elon Musk in the Spring was one of the bigger moments when cracks began to show in the MAGA base. Even after the right largely came together for one of the most significant online moments of the year following Charlie Kirk’s killing, division about the Epstein Files, Israel, and even Kirk’s death have deepened earlier cracks.”

Taken together, 2025's data reveals an online political ecosystem defined by chaos and relentless shifts in attention. For the Trump administration, and increasingly for some Democrats, the internet’s feedback loop of outrage, engagement, and conspiracy in reaction to every single news story has blurred the line between governing and performing. Politicians in both parties have raced to exploit this dynamic, though at uneven speeds, and heading into the 2026 midterms, the pace shows no sign of slowing down. 

Last week, a little-noticed showdown began in the Republican fundraising space that could significantly affect the party's campaign infrastructure heading into the midterms.

Alex Bruesewitz, a leading Trump-world digital strategist, announced that he’s been working with conservative e-commerce company Public Square to launch a new GOP fundraising platform called PSQ Impact. Until now, most major Republican campaigns have relied on WinRed, the party’s main fundraising software, to process grassroots donations.

Here’s why this matters: WinRed was launched in 2019 after officials at the Republican National Committee and in Trump’s orbit sought to replicate ActBlue, Democrats’ one-stop shop for grassroots donations. The idea was to create a shared fundraising platform that could harness the network effect of aggregated donor data, including pre-saved payment information for one-click checkouts. For a while, that approach seemed to work. A report released this summer showed that WinRed had processed $5.6 billion in contributions from 8.8 million individual donors.

Further reinforcing WinRed’s importance in the Republican tech ecosystem, the fundraising platform is actually owned in part by the Data Trust, the company that serves as the party’s central data repository. That means that WinRed was specifically set up to help fund the entire GOP data ecosystem, and donor data from WinRed is shared with the Data Trust to improve the party’s voter modeling scores. 

Given that setup, it’s surprising to see prominent digital operatives on the Right urging campaigns to move to a competing platform. In his announcement last week, Bruesewitz criticized WinRed’s high processing fees. But that seems like a fixable problem — and far easier to resolve than convincing the entire Republican campaign world to adopt a new platform from scratch.

“The hard part of this problem isn't the technology or the pricing. It's ... getting our whole team on the same system for single-click donations. That’s WinRed’s advantage," Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist told Axios last week.

Last Wednesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hosted 130 social media creators at the Governor’s residence in Harrisburg for a holiday reception. Collectively, the cohort of micro-and-macro influencers possessed an owned audience of over 62 million across platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and comprised creators who post about sports, culture, comedy, and politics. The next day, Shapiro hosted a small brunch conversation with several in attendance to chat about the internet and the state of the industry for content creators in 2025. 

Wednesday’s party was just the latest in a long string of creator-focused events and relationship-building strategies used by Shapiro’s team over the years—relationships that will prove useful as he heads into a re-election campaign next year.