New Power
TikTok's digital crowd is challenging traditional power this election year
Celebrated thought leader Henry Timms, in his groundbreaking 2018 book called New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World, famously identified the new ways digital crowds are starting to use their social networks to challenge traditional leadership.
Old, traditional forms of power, he says (and has told many of my grad students at Columbia), operate like a currency. “It is held by a few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and only the most powerful people have a lot of it to spend,” he says. “It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven.” It also is the kind of power used by some old-school governments and company cultures today—and in ways at stiff odds with how today’s young adults build influence online.
New power, though, works much differently. It is made by many. It is open, participatory and peer-driven. It distributes power like a current—“like water or electricity,” Henry wrote, and “new power is most forceful when it surges.” Those wielding new power in digital networks don’t hoard it, he says—but “channel it and share it to make change.”
New power is the kind of power TikTok is beginning to both enable and encourage today.
It’s why the uproar over last week’s TikTok vote is as much about the expanding power of the digital crowd to challenge traditional power and leadership as it is about China’s potential to use the social media platform for data meddling in this year’s presidential election.
As Americans’ confidence in government and mainstream media remains low, digital influencers with large followings on social media are being increasingly perceived as having more trust, credibility and reach than many of today’s hyper-partisan lobbyists and lawmakers. Pew Research says the digital crowd is gaining power as one of the most influential voting blocs many U.S. businesses and American political campaigns want to have now in their election-year arsenals.
Like many of us who lead new media initiatives, I couldn’t help but think about Henry’s new power/old power comparison last week while watching House members quickly and collaboratively vote, 352-65, to approve the “TikTok sell-or-ban” bill. It was a rare, leader-led, old-power display of a dysfunctional Congress snapped into a bipartisan bloc to blunt TikTok’s data-driven, new power lobbying strategy to mobilize a digital tidal wave of its top content creators and influencers to oppose the bill.
Before the vote, TikTok sent push notices to the app’s 170 million American users using location information to connect them by phone to their member of Congress, and hundreds of thousands of TikTokers flooded lawmaker’s offices with millions of megabytes and gigabytes of digital communication expressing their fierce opposition to a ban or forced sale. After the vote, TikTokers shifted their sights to the Senate, where the bill’s fate is now uncertain.
ICYMI
In case you missed last week’s drama, the vote on the bill came shortly after House lawmakers received a secret, closed-door Defense Department briefing on China’s national security laws, which FBI and U.S. national security officials say make it possible for the Chinese government to monitor TikTok’s China-owned parent company, ByteDance, and gain access to some of TikTok’s data on its 170 million American users. While no hard evidence of this has yet been shared, lawmakers in the briefing were told that the Chinese government could, potentially, use TikTok’s data to sway its power over TikTok’s algorithms—and influence American politics one way or the other in this year’s tight race for the White House. The legislation would effectively ban the TikTok app in the U.S. unless ByteDance agrees to divest TikTok’s American platform to a Western company.
Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to China, said there are indications that the Chinese government might already be meddling. According to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation and one by the New York Times, workers in China update TikTok’s algorithm so frequently that TikTok’s efforts to wall off American data from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are helpful, but may not yet be 100% secure. The investigative report also found that TikTok’s data-mining algorithm is so advanced that it only needs one important piece of information to figure out what its users want, and is, therefore, so engaging to users that the average session on TikTok lasts 11 minutes—far longer than other social media platforms. “That’s time to transit hundreds of data signals about an individual user into TikTok’s data banks,” says blogger and NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway. “It’s sweet data crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”
Digital media analysts say the escalation of new power is an expanding reality that old power institutions are just beginning to explore and are still trying to fully understand.
New Power’s Clout
With President Biden’s vow to sign the bill into law if it reaches his desk, and Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he no longer thinks TikTok should be banned, the TikTok platform has already become a new battleground in this year’s tight race for the White House.
Here are some insights into how last week’s action reflects new power’s influence:
Strange bedfellows. New power tends to amplify the participation of new voices previously overlooked by traditional power. As the House voted on the ban/sale bill, we noticed something we never thought we’d see—that progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and conservative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, (R-GA) had actually agreed on something—their opposition to the bill, itself. Both women used TikTok and other platforms to build support for their candidacy to the House, and to communicate with the people they represent. Taylor-Greene, in a House floor speech after the vote, described the bill as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. AOC, for her part, said there is a delicate balance between national security and civil rights that could make the bill unconstitutional in a court of law.
Citizen lobbyists. GenZ, aged 18 to 27, is one of the most sought-after new voting blocs in the Trump/Biden battle for a second term, given its growing digital influence and TikTok’s ability to expose content created on the app to hundreds of thousands of users immediately, based on users’ community interests. Pew Research says that TikTok’s app is now GenZ’s favorite social media platform. TikTok spent millions of dollars before last week’s House vote to fly some of its top content creator and user communities to Washington to protest the bill, and to create an internal communications campaign aided by its algorithm to send U.S. users customized information about who represents them in Congress and how to reach them by phone and email. The campaign was so sophisticated, some lawmakers told us, it “spooked” some lawmakers into seeing TikTok’s mobilization power as a way it also could spread misinformation. [TikTok has already been criticized for carrying more pro-Palestinian content from users on its platform than pro-Israel content, a bias charge TikTok has denied and recent survey data contradicts.]
Political clout. GenZ’s transactional influence via TikTok is growing. Most lawmakers who voted for the ban/sale bill experienced an immediate loss of support from TikTok influencers. Rep. Jeff Jackson, D-NC, with more than 2.5 million followers on the platform, lost more than 200,000 of them within hours after his vote to support the bill, forcing him to create an apology video to explain his support and assuage the backlash. Jeff said his apology didn’t help much to reverse the lost support, but clarified the depth and cause of the anger his followers shared. The digital crowd is also moving away from its support of President Biden. Pew Research says GenZ has identified itself as being predominantly liberal politically, but the President’s support for Israel in the Gaza war—and now his pledge to sign the TikTok bill into law if the Senate approves it—are giving GenZ supporters second thoughts. Political analysts say Biden will need to pick up the support of many of the millions of new GenZ voters now old enough to vote for the first time this fall. Trump, meanwhile, plans to make his new opposition to the TikTok bill a major message in his upcoming rallies.
What’s next for New Power?
As philosopher Bertrand Russell once defined it, power is the “ability to produce intended effects.” In Henry’s book, New Power, he reminds us that because our technology has changed, we now all have the capacity to “produce intended effects” by spreading our ideas across digital networks, by building socially networked communities and by seeding social movements on social media platforms in a heartbeat. But the deeper truth, Henry says, is that our digital tools have been changing us—our attitudes and behaviors toward those in power, and what we expect from each other to thrive and survive.
“Building this new power across society will be challenging,” Henry wrote in New Power—“especially at a time when public support for democracy itself is at historic lows in much of the industrialized world and especially among young people.” But the new power genie also will be hard to put back into the bottle now that it’s been deployed. The success of new power, says Henry, “will require those on the side of the angels to get a lot better at delivering user experiences, sticky feedback loops and a compelling set of incentives for us, across generations, to restore vitality to our essential social functions— and to democracy, itself.”
Stay tuned.