TikTok's Super Tuesday
Like it or not, the social media giant is gaining global influence by reinventing how we make and share news
Today is Super Tuesday, the biggest primary election day in America’s tumultuous 2024 election cycle. All the big news outlets cover it—and now, so does TikTok.
For many of the nearly 2 billion people using the social media platform—a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese tech firm ByteDance—TikTok is still best-known as a mobile video-sharing app which two out of three U.S. teens use daily to share videos of themselves dancing or of cats falling off furniture.
Now, though, as TikTok’s early users get older and more young adults are being drawn to the platform, the social media juggernaut is veering rapidly into a new role as a major news source and effective mobilizer for social action. Its feted new “For You” algorithm now factors “community interests” into the diverse but highly tailored content it recommends to each user, and this new strategy is increasing TikTok’s popularity and influence. According to Pew Research, at least half of American adults—nearly 40% of those aged 18-30 and some 25% of those 31-48 —now get their news directly from TikTok rather than from traditional media, quadrupling its reach since 2020.
With many American news organizations cutting staff or shutting down, local news outlets in a near-death spiral, and the former Twitter (now X) void of fact-checkers and limits on hate speech, media analysts expect “Newsy TikTok” to start adding more content creators, news influencers and traditional news organizations to its platform this election year, when more than half the world’s population will be heading to the polls with autocracy on the ballot.
Bad or good?
In the past, both President Biden and Donald Trump have sought to put some limits on TikTok’s growing influence as a Beijing-based company by demanding more transparency about how its algorithm works and the data it collects on Americans using the platform.
A new bill calling for TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company —or face a ban in the United States—breezed through the House Energy and Commerce committee in Congress this week on a 50-0 vote in a rare show of bipartisan political unity. The legislation now moves to the House floor.
Despite this development—and ironically, perhaps—both President Biden and Donald Trump have TikTok accounts which they’re using to help build support for themselves in key voting blocs during their rematch for the White House.
In February, President Biden started posting on TikTok as @bidenhq —on the day of the Super Bowl, following the advice of advisors wanting him to reassure GenZ of his social media acuity. GenZ comments weren’t very kind; the President is still taking a hit for his age and his failure to achieve a more strident climate policy, one of GenZ’s top policy priorities. Donald Trump also is posting actively on TikTok this election season, as donaldtrumppage, showing that he’s following no one, has 249,000 followers and so far, 2.8 million likes—yet during his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to ban the use of TikTok by government agencies—and then later, also during his presidency, Trump sought to ban the use of TikTok in the United States unless it could be co-owned by a U.S. company, a move that later was rejected.
Advisors for both Trump and Biden say they consider TikTok and other social platforms an important way to build support among this year’s new wave of GenZ voters. In 2020, hundreds of GenZ content creators got together to form TikTok For Biden, a nonprofit set up to leverage their collective power online to help Biden get elected. Young people’s feelings toward Biden, however, have since soured. TikTok videos opposing his policies on the war in Gaza and his administration’s lack of faster progress on climate change are now posted, and he is losing some of that earlier GenZ support. Biden’s campaign has been doubling down in recent months to court GenZ voters back into the fold, taking meetings with some of the top climate activists posting on TikTok’s app. Pew Research says 16 million GenZers will be able to vote in November for the first time in a presidential election.
“Our Roman Empire is reaching voters where they are, and will continue to do so,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Biden’s reelection campaign, told Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, in a recent interview, referring to President Biden’s strong intent to do more to re-engage young supporters. [Rob was using a phrase popularized by GenZ in recent months that is shorthand for something a person cares deeply about and can’t stop thinking about. ]
Next steps forward
To put its new influence strategy into full swing this election year, TikTok has been informally encouraging its most popular creators and influencers to produce more in-person news interviews, take on more “TikTok Anchor” roles and offer up more short videos in newscast mode. Many creators have already been filming themselves sharing hot takes and rapidly spoken social commentaries—most without TikTok’s direct encouragement.
Some of the posts (not all, like this post by briangold ) might lack polish and need to remove some expletives to be worthy of the Op-Ed page at The New York Times, but substance-wise, many are actually preferred by TikTok followers, which polls reveal prefer authenticity and influence over polish most of the time. Case in point: mattbooshell has more than 354,000 followers and has so far wracked up 19.6 million likes. His fast-talked opinions are free-form verbal essays, which he posts several times a week and records into his smartphone while walking the streets of New York.
Besides breaking news, many young influencers on the platform are also moving more into activism, using TikTok to help them raise more awareness for their cause and to dispatch a series of updates to followers from the front lines of some of the protest rallies they attend. During the burst of some of the first on-campus protests last fall over the Israel-Hamas war, literally hundreds of students supporting one side or the other in the conflict recorded several hours of mobile video on their smartphones while colleagues were editing their clips and uploading to TikTok while seated in parked cars or in neighborhood coffee bars—far from the fray. One of the videos frequently shared by those TikTokking more recent protests—and now saying they won’t vote for President Biden if he doesn’t force a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war—is of a protester interrupting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to demand stronger action.
The Gaza war has stoked a wave of criticism in Congress, and some GOP members have expressed concern that some of the most popular content related to the Israel-Hamas war that’s being posted on TikTok has had a pro-Palestinian slant. Citing TikTok’s Chinese founders, some lawmakers have said TikTok’s algorithm may be helping to promote the anti-war content on the platform as a way to put Israel in a bad light and trigger disinformation. TikTok has consistently denied these claims, has said it “stands against terrorism” and that it does not influence views on the platform based on the interests of China’s government or any other. Subsequent polls have suggested the predominance of GenZers posting their takes on the war have accurately reflected where they stand, with no disinformation found nor likely intended.
What TikTok or any other media company prizes most in a digital media world, however, is influence, and TikTok keeps delivering influence to its users as it continues to grow globally as a platform by reshaping the social media ecosystem worldwide.
“What people tend to miss about social networks today is that as social media platforms evolve and mature, they will be open to more public scrutiny and (calls for more) professional oversight, but what is sometimes missed is the innovation of TikTok’s platform. It represents a concentration of millions of young people connecting in the same virtual place—hundreds of millions of them—now with access to other people from different countries who have begun providing each other with information and interactions that cross borders,” says Nesrine Malik, an opinion columnist for The Guardian (U.K.). “Some of these interactions would be impossible to access in any physical space. And most of them now? They can fill a need that can’t be satisfied any longer by mainstream media, which few of these people consume at source anyway.”
To understand the emotional power and strategy behind what TikTok is building, Taylor Lorenz, who covers social media and AI for The Washington Post, says TikTok has been organized precisely to accommodate the needs and desires of what GenZ prizes in today’s digital culture.
Taylor, an influencer on TikTok with 537,000 followers and 9.6 million likes, explained in her recent book, Extremely Online: “There is an underlying human desire to document and broadcast on the part of GenZ, as the online world is often more ‘real’ that our material one,” she wrote. “We want our existence validated and increasingly, an online presence is the measure of that validation. And how does one validate themselves online? By connecting, and by being noticed for the content that they’re producing. That act of connection is inherently optimistic. It’s a vote for the belief that being connected is better than being alone.”
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