Senator Vance’s status as the first millennial on a major party’s presidential ticket comes with some benefits for the Trump campaign staff, who are trying to make inroads with younger men of all races before the November election. His relative youth has also proven to be fertile ground for reporters, as his social media usage receives scrutiny from some determined media figures. 

Mr. Vance is one of a handful of members of Congress who run their own X accounts. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congressman Maxwell Frost, and Congressman Mike Lawler, to name a few, are some of the others. Those four lawmakers have almost never been on the same page, though they do have one thing in common: They’re all under the age of 40.

Mr. Vance, who is 39, may be the first of many Millennials and Gen Zers to be elevated to the national stage, and for that crime, he will have to face increasing scrutiny from members of the press as they comb through his years of social media use. 

On Thursday, just hours after Mr. Vance delivered his acceptance speech for the vice presidential nomination, a report was published about his network of friends on Venmo, the mobile payment app used to send small amounts of money. 

The report, from Wired magazine, dug into Mr. Vance’s friends list on the app. Users have the opportunity to make that list of friends and their transactions with other users private, though Mr. Vance apparently failed to do so. 

The outlet says the friends list gives an “unfiltered glimpse into his extensive network of connections with establishment GOP heavyweights, wealthy financiers, technology executives, the prestige press, and fellow graduates of Yale Law School.”

Mr. Vance’s friend network, in reality, shows he’s close with the exact kind of people an up-and-coming Republican official would have. Connections to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, government lawyers, former senators, conservative media figures, and tech leaders who Mr. Vance has worked with in the past is far from the nefarious network of influence on the senator that Wired would have readers believe. 

Rather, that Mr. Vance’s mobile payment friend group was reviewed by members of the press proves how younger candidates’ pre-political life social media habits will become gold mines for reporters in the years to come. It would be hard to find the faxes President Biden and President Trump might have been sending back when they were Mr. Vance’s age. 

It isn’t just Mr. Vance’s perfectly understandable network of friends on a payment app that have received scrutiny. Long before he was a candidate for political office, Mr. Vance was active on X, formerly known as Twitter, criticizing Trump around the time of his election to the presidency in 2016.

A 2021 review of Mr. Vance’s past X posts by CNN found that the future senator called Trump “reprehensible” for anti-immigrant views and policies. In a private message to a former law school roommate sent in 2016, Mr. Vance wondered aloud if Trump was “America’s Hitler”, and called his now-running mate “a cynical ass**** like Nixon.”

“I think most people are not very ideological, and Trump, while I find him loathsome, touches a legitimate nerve. You should read David Frum’s piece in the Atlantic on the Republican revolt. But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame,” Mr. Vance wrote to former roommate Josh McLaurin, who now serves as a Democratic state senator in Georgia. “Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect.”

In October 2016, Mr. Vance wrote on X that he would be voting for independent candidate Evan McMullin for president that year. The post was later deleted. 

The social media snooping into Mr. Vance began long before he was nominated for vice president, but Americans have been reminded about it extensively since he was selected as Trump’s running mate.  When all of the negative quotes were unearthed during his 2022 Senate bid, he was able to brush them off as he was vying for the Trump endorsement. When the former president gave Mr. Vance his blessing in that Republican primary, Trump said he was unbothered. 

“He’s a guy that said some bad sh– about me, he did, but you know what? Every one of the others did also,” Trump said at a rally with Mr. Vance ahead of the 2022 GOP Senate primary in Ohio.