Recently, Saturday evening live published a sketch mocking the user experience of scrolling through TikTok’s ForYouPage.

The clip that made me laugh the most – and got the most attention – was a parody where the Vice President Kamala Harrisplayed by Maya Rudolph, strikes power poses and delivers verbal reprimands to the backdrop of club music.

If that sounds weird to you, well, truth is stranger than fiction. SNL here was directly referring to @kamalahq account on TikTok, where 5 million followers tune in to watch daily videos — usually montages of the presidential candidate set to trending music and using targeted captions to Generation Zlike “she’s so real” and “I think I’ve seen this movie before.”

Parodies are meant to make people laugh, yes, and the SNL skit does just that while raising a larger question: How successful is social media in influencing GenZ voters? The short answer: very. For example, the Trump campaign just broke Snapchat scene this week. The Harris campaign spent $7.8 million in Snapchat advertising since March. We questioned our Gen Z Council and more than half of those surveyed answered “yes” to the question “Do you follow politicians on social media?”

According to Forbesnearly half of Gen Z — 46% — turn to social media first for their information needs. Snapchat specifically reports having over 100 million users in the United States (nearly ⅓ of the total US population, for context), on half of which are Generation Z. Social media, with its huge Gen Z user base, and Generation Z, many of whom use social media to get their news, are inextricably linked.

For both the Harris and Trump campaigns, this is worth getting their attention. 41 million members of Generation Z will be entitled to vote in this election – more than 8 million of them for the first time – making it one of the largest vote blocks. The way both campaigns use social media has real potential to influence the political views of Generation Z (teenagers are already more sensitive than adults to online conspiracies) and will directly affect the results of the November 5 election.

Perhaps the most notable way in which both campaigns reach teenagers is their political content. However, what is rather worrying is that influencers who tout their political support to their millions of followers, often, TO DO no need to disclose when a campaign pays them to do it. Unlike product placements, where an influencer is required to clearly indicate that a brand paid them to promote said product, political influence does not require any disclaimer or admission of money or the involvement of the campaign.

So it’s important for Gen Z to know that much of the political content they see on their social media feeds is made up of paid posts directly from the campaigns themselves, rather than independent ideas from influencers from the social networks.

And perhaps most importantly, there is a need for parents to recognize how much social media influences their children – and talk to their teens about the consequences of that influence in the upcoming election.

In a survey of our Gen Z Council, 70% of respondents answered “yes” to the question “Are you comfortable publicly revealing your political views and identity?” ” while the remaining 30% responded “not sure.” If you are a parent of the 30% who are still exploring their political identity, it is especially important to have conversations about evaluating the sources from which political content comes as your children work to develop their opinions. If you’re a parent of the 70%: Young people who know where they stand politically and likely receive a lot of like-minded political content on their social media may be especially curious to learn that they are still susceptible to being “influenced” “.

Generation Z is both heavily influenced and very influential when it comes to the upcoming election. That being said, knowledge is power, and the best way to empower your Gen Z child is to make sure they are informed about how campaigns are reaching them before they head to the polls.