53 arrested. The same weekend, at another gathering, five police officers trying to disperse a crowd were hit by an 18-year-old driving a car. Videos from these events have gripped the Windy City of late. “People literally say the words ‘teen takeover’ to me all the time,” says Susana Mendoza, the state comptroller and a mayoral candidate, who wants the police to be given expanded powers to break up gatherings. Larry Snelling, the police superintendent, says Chicago has “to stop making excuses” for unruly young people. The city’s leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, avoids the term “takeover”, preferring “teen trend”. He has resisted an attempt to strengthen the city’s existing teen-curfew ordinance. The battle shows how even as serious crime declines, public disorder remains politically divisive. Takeovers are organised by anonymous “promoters” on TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat. By no means are they confined to Chicago. Similar events have occurred in dozens of cities and suburbs all over the country, and in other countries too. Most who come are just bored kids. But when hundreds of young people suddenly rush into a public place, mayhem often follows. Footage from Chicago shows teenagers jumping on cars. In early May a large party in a suburb of Oklahoma City led to a mass shooting where one woman was killed and at least 22 people injured. Managing the response is tricky. Though many on the right, such as John Catanzara, the head of Chicago’s police union, pretend otherwise, it is not realistic for police to simply arrest everyone. It takes a lot of cops to disperse hundreds of kids. Anticipating takeovers is not that easy either. Promoters often wait until the last minute to reveal where to gather and, as at Foster Beach, fears can come to nothing. Some people want parents to be punished for letting their offspring run wild. Ms Mendoza says she has heard of people driving teenagers to the events. As long as they continue, the takeovers will be a headache for liberal city leaders. Videos from Chicago have featured heavily on Fox News, and Donald Trump has weighed in. What seems obvious is that without social media, it would not be happening. Teenagers have always been riotous, but it has never been so easy to incite them. According to Ramey Kyle, an assistant chief of Washington, DC’s police, some promoters are just trying to make their posts go viral. That way they can earn money from advertising. ■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/11/social-media-is-behind-both- teen-takeovers-and-the-outrage-they-fuel
America’s mayors join the scrabble to become influencers A dispatch from Long Beach, California June 11th 2026 ON A RECENT Friday in Long Beach, California, more than a dozen mayors from across America sat in a circle in a cavernous conference room. They sipped coffee (it was 8am) and opened TikTok and Instagram on their phones. “Go and search on TikTok in your local city,” instructed Shelby Leimgruber, a self-described “creator-economy strategist”. “Spend ten minutes doomscrolling, and you’ll be surprised what you find.” The session, part of the annual Conference of Mayors, was meant to nudge America’s local leaders to connect with influencers in their cities. Yet Elizabeth Kautz, the mayor of Burnsville, Minnesota wondered aloud: “How can we become influencers as well?”
She isn’t the only one. Daniel Lurie, the mayor of San Francisco, walks the streets between meetings to post from restaurants, street festivals and scenic sites. Dressed in a suit and tie, he shows off San Francisco’s pho, hot pot and salt bread. In one video the mayor hunts for Chonkers (a tremendously fat sea lion). His aim is twofold: support local spots and, by showing off the city, try to rehabilitate San Francisco’s tarnished reputation. “It’s a way to share what we’re working on, be transparent about our challenges, celebrate progress and highlight the people and places that make this city special,” says Mr Lurie. His posting is so prolific that an analysis of his Instagram was part of the curriculum in Long Beach. But it’s not all pho and fat sea lions. Several mayors in Long Beach wondered how they could feature businesses without being accused of playing favourites or being corporate shills. How do you “make sure you’re not winding up doing car commercials for someone”? asked Derrick McDowell, the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio. Others worried that state laws banning officials from using TikTok on government devices would prevent posting. “The day you’re elected, half the people hate you,” noted Bobby Gutierrez, the mayor of Bryan, Texas. The TikTok savants at the conference seemed ill-equipped to answer such questions, and settled for telling America’s mayors to “be really intentional” and “hire more young people”. Many mayors left Long Beach excited to post. Larry Klein of Sunnyvale, California started recommending restaurants to his constituents during covid. Now he is a bona fide food blogger (#EatSunnyvale) with a website full of restaurant reviews (all of them positive). At a Vietnamese coffee shop recently, Mr Klein was even asked to join a TikTok dance. “If the mayor dancing around with an influencer for a video makes a difference,” he offered with a shrug, “that’s the easiest thing I can do.”■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/10/americas-mayors-join-the- scrabble-to-become-influencers
Tik-Tocqueville Why “Democracy in America” is worth going back to on the country’s 250th birthday June 11th 2026 It’s hard to know how to mark a milestone birthday, especially for the rich and powerful. A fancy dinner, or perhaps a trip? As America approaches 250, friends and admirers at home and abroad worry that it has lost its shimmer. The last time a majority of Americans thought their country was on the right track was a generation ago. For those keen to celebrate America’s birthday but wary of overdoing it, this newspaper recommends something more cerebral than a cage fight on the lawn: reading Alexis de Tocqueville. Why him? A young French aristocrat who visited the country just once in the 1830s, Tocqueville was an unlikely prophet. He went travelling partly to
escape his parents, who disapproved of his girlfriend and his liberal politics. But his nine-month trip across 17 of the then 24 states filled 14 notebooks and produced “Democracy in America”, one of the best books about democracy, or America. Its two volumes, written five years apart, mix political science, sociology, journalism and prediction. It is long, occasionally turgid and also funny. It is not universally loved: Walter Isaacson reckons it is the least-read and most quoted book about America. Reading it cover to cover is indeed a slog. It is better dipped into, like Montaigne’s “Essays” or a recipe book. The recipes it contains describe how to mix equality, prosperity, law, religion and democracy in the right proportions to make freedom. If the Federalist Papers laid out how it started, “Democracy in America” explains how it is going. When Tocqueville wrote the book, the country was two generations from the founding and two away from its reckoning with slavery. Success seemed likely but was still not guaranteed. When he arrived in New York in May 1831, embarking on a nine-month tour on a fact-finding mission for the French government to study America’s prisons, the city had a population of 200,000 crammed into a few blocks in lower Manhattan. Paris was four times the size. To make the case to Europeans that America was not some odd experiment, but a model for the rest of the world, took foresight. That America should turn out well is no surprise to a reader in 2026, so why return to the book now? One reason is for the moments of recognition. Take this one, familiar to any visitor who has ever flopped on a hotel bed after a long flight to America and flicked on cable news. “To a stranger,” he writes in book one, “all the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to be incomprehensible or puerile, and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.” Or this observation, on presidential elections: “As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps [...] the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the press, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and action, the sole interest of the present.” Then, as soon as it’s over, “this ardour is dispelled, calm returns,