In 2016, the D.C. newspaper The Hill crowned Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, the “Snapchat king of Congress.” Not only was he adept at using the app—which allows users to share ephemeral photos—to communicate directly with his constituents, but Swalwell had also set himself up as a tutor, of sorts, to his colleagues. (“I tell the members, just trust me,” he said. “In a year, we’re all going to be there anyway.”) Snapchat would, in fact, be superseded as the political-comms fad du jour, but Democratic hand-wringing about the Party’s visibility in a fragmented attention economy has never gone out of style, and Swalwell has often been seen as an exemplar of how to be everywhere, all at once. (Even before he became the Snapchat king, he inspired the Twitter trend Swalwelling, or the practice of photographing your feet as you step onto a plane.) Last November, when Swalwell entered the race for governor of California, Politico wrote that his candidacy would test the power of a “national profile constructed through cable news hits, Trump bashing and social media saturation.” He has since posted TikToks channelling an array of memes: playing “six seven” with his daughter, lip-synching to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” doing the “Beez in the Trap” routine with a teen-age content creator. Last week, the Times reported on Democrats’ burgeoning use of the F-word on X, and found Swalwell to be a prolific adopter.

Shortly before that story appeared, Swalwell felt compelled to respond to a less welcome form of online attention: a growing drumbeat of rumors that he had behaved inappropriately with women, including members of his staff. Swalwell’s campaign—which claimed that the accusations were being pushed by rivals working hand in glove with “MAGA conspiracy theorists”—clearly viewed staying silent as untenable. “We know how the new media ecosystem works,” one adviser said. “We know how misinformation spreads.” Some of the posts hinted at forthcoming news coverage, the prospect of which apparently spooked donors and supporters, and on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published stories on allegations of sexual misconduct made by a total of four women, one of whom said that Swalwell had raped her. Swalwell reportedly sent the women graphic messages and images via Snapchat. “There was Eric the Snapchatting guy,” a former employee of Swalwell’s told CNN, “and then there was Eric my boss.”

In a video posted to Instagram, Swalwell admitted to errors of judgment but called the claims of sexual assault “flat false” and promised to “fight them with everything that I have.” On Sunday, however, he suspended his gubernatorial campaign; the following day, amid speculation that he might imminently face a vote on his expulsion from Congress, he said that he would give up his House seat, too. On Tuesday, another woman came forward with a rape allegation. Soon afterward, his resignation took effect. (He continues to deny the reports of misconduct and assault.)

In some ways, this miserable tale is as old as time. In others, it looks like a parable of our modern media environment, with its cacophony of voices, old and new, all clamoring for attention. If Swalwell lived by this clamor—making himself heard everywhere, from CNN to buzzy podcasts—his career now appears to have died by it, too. (Not that we should yet rule out Swalwell one day trying to start a podcast of his own.) It’s often said that the new voices in this ecosystem are rendering the old irrelevant, and it’s certainly true that legacy media is in secular decline. I’ve long thought, however, that the relationship is symbiotic: the old guard increasingly needs the new to draw eyeballs to its reporting, and the new needs to talk about said reporting since it doesn’t do much laborious fact-gathering of its own. When it comes to the Swalwell story, this dynamic seems to have become particularly intertwined.

According to a detailed time line published by Politico, that story began when Arielle Fodor, an education content creator known as Mrs. Frazzled, posted positively about Swalwell’s nascent gubernatorial bid, only for several people to reach out, alleging, among other things, that he had slept with an intern. Fodor and another prominent online personality, Cheyenne Hunt, a former Democratic congressional candidate, took the lead in posting about the rumors that Swalwell eventually responded to. At the same time, behind the scenes, they brought together his accusers and steered them in the direction of CNN, which had the institutional heft—and, most important, high-powered media lawyers—that they lacked. (Hunt told Politico that her and Fodor’s crusade should not be seen as “a green light to creators who think that they should be breaking sensitive news.”)

In the end, it took a time-honored brand of journalism to actually bring Swalwell down, even if influencers rolled the pitch. Viewed narrowly, the latter’s role might even be seen as a version of the reporter-source relationship. But that isn’t quite right, either. As Hunt has put it, she and Fodor developed the sort of “parasocial relationships that get built on social media”—itself a form of reporting—to win the trust of Swalwell’s alleged victims. And, as Politico noted, political operatives have been left wondering whether their initial online salvos against Swalwell reflect a “new normal.” Already, political campaigns had been navigating their own awkward symbiosis—or, perhaps, a less reciprocated relationship—with content creators, courting them for their huge audiences (see again: “Beez in the Trap,” Swalwell, 2025) while remaining wary of their loose editorial standards and primary incentive to chase clout. Earlier this year, a TikToker in Texas claimed that James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for Senate, had privately described Colin Allred, an opponent who had dropped out of the primary, as a “mediocre Black man.” Talarico denied attacking Allred on the basis of race. He won his primary anyway, but not before the controversy blew up—both on social media and in the traditional mainstream press.

The modern attention economy, of course, has been blamed, including by me, for offering the scandal-plagued an out from critical scrutiny by allowing them to sidestep mainstream-media gatekeepers and make their case to a public that is atomized, polarized, and distracted. President Donald Trump is the foremost avatar of this trend: since the beginning of his political career, he has flooded old and new media alike with such a constant churn of outrage that typically career-ending infamies—including multiple claims of sexual assault (which he denies)—have more or less bounced off. But many big names have indeed been disgraced in the Trump era, despite their attempts to use the rhythms of the attention economy to rebound: Andrew Cuomo, after resigning as governor of New York, started a podcast, then ran for mayor; George Santos, the Republican congressman exposed as a serial liar, used his notoriety as a springboard to meme-ification. Cuomo’s podcast and mayoral bid flopped. Santos went to prison, even if Trump ultimately let him out. (You can still book him on Cameo.)

Swalwell’s downfall might even show that, if old-school journalism can still mete out consequences for bad behavior, new media can sometimes accelerate this process, rather than dilute it. Expulsions from the House are rare—there have only ever been six, the latest of which saw Santos kicked out, in 2023—but, as of the beginning of this week, it looked plausible that Swalwell would soon join their number, and that three other lawmakers might, too: the Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (accused of financial fraud) and the Republicans Tony Gonzales (sexual misconduct) and Cory Mills (both). Their expulsions were never guaranteed; two-thirds of their colleagues would have to consent, which is a high bar, and leaders in both parties reportedly remain leery of removing elected representatives without first affording rigorous due process. (Even the expulsion of Santos was controversial, since he hadn’t yet been convicted of a crime, but he had at least been put on blast by the House Committee on Ethics, which recently declared the guilt of Cherfilus-McCormick but wasn’t done weighing in on the other cases.) There was also an unseemly whiff of insider partisan horse-trading here—two Democrats for two Republicans—in a razor-close chamber. But the mere consideration of such extreme punishment seemed to reflect another dynamic of this moment, itself very much downstream of the modern media environment: an increasingly sulfurous anti-establishment energy, and the incentive for denizens of that establishment to be seen taking it seriously.

Cherfilus-McCormick and Mills have denied any wrongdoing, and appear safe—if only for this week. Gonzales said, on the same day as Swalwell, that he would resign. The seeds of Gonzales’s departure were sowed by a local paper, the San Antonio Express-News, which reported on an alleged sexual relationship with an aide who later died after setting herself on fire. (He was subsequently accused of inappropriate conduct toward a second employee.) Gonzales initially denied any affair; after texts surfaced disproving this and showing apparently coercive behavior, he went on “The Joe Pags Show,” a right-wing talk vehicle, and acknowledged a lapse in judgment, though he vehemently distanced himself from his aide’s death. “You cannot hate the media enough,” Gonzales said. “There’s a reason why I’m coming on your show. There’s a reason why I reached out to you, and this alternative way of getting real information out. This was all a very coördinated attack toward me.” This clapback didn’t work for Gonzales—even before announcing his resignation, he had dropped his reëlection bid. That left the G.O.P. lane open to Gonzales’s primary opponent, Brandon Herrera. He might be better known as the AK Guy, his moniker on YouTube, where he came to fame posting about guns. ♦