Our goal when we launched this pop-up newsletter was to provide data and analysis to help readers understand the vibes on TikTok - measuring the conversations about the candidates, the content that was popping off, and the messages that the media may be missing. 

Since we launched back in July, it has been a wild ride, both online and IRL. From Donald Trump’s assassination attempt(s) to his stunt at McDonald’s, from Kamala Harris owning the debate to introducing Coach Walz to the world via TimTok, it’s been a privilege to chronicle this insane time in American history with you.

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Reflecting on our analysis and data from the last several months, as we’ve reported on consistently throughout, Trump dominated the conversation – just like he seems to dominate every conversation – but typically was not always seen in the best light. He had his many, many supporters on TikTok for sure. But, week in and week out, we regularly found his sentiment score far underwater.

However, loved or hated, the Trump campaign definitely found a way to be relevant on the platform. Months ago, we openly wondered why @realdonaldtrump posted so rarely, despite racking up massive numbers with every post. By rolling out @teamtrump in the final months of the campaign, they found a way to post often and flood the zone with videos that regularly racked up tens of millions of views. By Election Day, some of their primary account metrics - followers, views, etc - surpassed those of the Harris campaign. 

By contrast, as readers will remember, Team Harris took the opposite approach, starting with their @kamalahq account and ultimately adding in @kamalaharris with its more personal and official voice.

This campaign will continue to be studied for years to come – by us and by many, many others, we’re sure. We hope we did our part to help you better make sense of it as it unfolded in real-time on TikTok.

It’s been an honor to be welcomed into your inbox every week for the last five months.

Thank you.

Everyone was talking about Trump

Since mid-August, we have used Zelf to track how many total videos and posts on TikTok mentioned either candidate. Week after week, we saw users create tens of thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris.

According to Zelf, from mid-August through Election Day, there were around 1.2 million posts on TikTok that mentioned Donald Trump in some way. By comparison, only ~400,000 posts mentioned Harris. 

The vibes were generally better for Harris

While Trump had far more total mentions than Harris, we continue to maintain that much more of the top-performing content about him on TikTok was negative or unfavorable to his candidacy. However, towards the end of the campaign, especially at the crucial point of late October, positive content about the former President increased, causing this overall positive sentiment to trend upward. That’s due in large part to viral posts from the @teamtrump account, which we’ll get into more below. 

Methodology for the above chart: Social analytics platform Zelf measures the overall sentiment of several thousand top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. Deploying a mix of AI scraping, sentiment analysis, and manual crosschecks, Zelf determines which posts are considered favorable, unfavorable, or neutral to the two candidates. 

Top posts mentioning Kamala Harris

These were some of the most viewed posts mentioning Kamala Harris since our tracking began in July:

The top post mentioning Harris from this period (which encompasses Harris’s entire time as the Democratic nominee) came from @msnbc talking about the now infamous Ann Selzer Iowa poll. It got 5 million likes and almost 80 million views.

Of the other top posts about VP Harris, there were several videos about debate interactions, including this one from @nbcnews with over 55 million views and 4.7 million likes, where Harris tells Trump she’s a gun owner. @nowthisimpact also had a top post with a video of Harris sharing her favorite curse word that got almost 46 million views.

Notably, two of the top ten videos mentioning VP Harris were actually of Donald Trump speaking directly to her. In one video from @dailymail with almost 40 million views, he’s speaking to a crowd about how awful she is and telling her she’s fired. In another, from @livefoxnow with 51.7 million views, he’s wishing her a happy birthday while “working” at McDonald’s.

Surprisingly, the Trump campaign itself only made the list once. @teamtrump shared a video of troops watching the debate and “fact-checking” the VP. It got 37.9 million views.

Top posts mentioning Donald Trump

These were some of the most viewed posts mentioning Donald Trump since our tracking began in July:

When it comes to top posts mentioning Trump over the past three or so months, @dailymail, which has dominated political TikTok this cycle, made the list three times. This post of Donald Trump saying the best way to stop depression is to work your ass off was viewed 83.7 million times and got 5.8 million likes. The other two from them were both assassination-related. This one, showing how close he came to being shot, got 71.4 million views and 2.7 million likes, and this one showing the “strange behavior” of a woman in the crowd during the shooting got 73.1 million views and 2.8 million likes.

In addition to @dailymail, @cbsnews also had a top post mentioning Trump with a video of Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter Kai speaking at the RNC which received over 63 million views, and @msnbc had one with 78.7 million views talking about the Ann Selzer Iowa poll that we mentioned above (which, of course, showed Harris flipping Iowa to win it and did not come to pass on Election Night).

Interestingly, this fun, apolitical post from @tyleredits97 shows what Donald Trump would look like if he had a perfect side profile was also amongst the top ones mentioning Trump with almost 80 million views – perhaps an indicator that Trump was able to capture non-political Americans much more seamlessly than VP Harris.

The most viral posts from the campaigns

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

And here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

The Harris campaign’s top 5 most viewed TikTok posts of the cycle were: 

1. “Thank you America.” Harris accepting the nomination at the DNC. 88.9 million views, 12 million likes

2. “It’s time to turn the page.” A closing message shared on the eve of the election. 67.1 million views and 11.1 million likes.

3. femininomenon. An early classic. 59.6 million views, 7.7 million likes.

4. “Ain’t no lie” with Lance Bass. 57.5 million views, 4.8 million likes.

5. “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.” Harris taunting Trump for refusing a second debate. 38.7 million views, 5.7 million likes.

The Trump campaign’s top 5 most viewed TikTok posts of the cycle were:

1. “Today we Save America.” An Election Day call to vote. 153.7 million views, 13.4 million likes.

2. “LOCKED IN.” “2 days until we fire Kamala.” 93.5 million views, 6.7 million likes.

3. Kamala The Grinch Hates Christmas. Donald Trump will protect Christmas. 90.7 million views, 9.2 million likes.

4. We love you Corey Comperatore. 79.1 million views, 982.7K likes.

5. Trump working the fryer. “I could do this all day… I like this job.” 68.8 million views, 7.6 million likes.

Important post-election reads:

• The Information: How TikTok courted conservatives before Trump’s win

• New York Times: Trump Raises TikTok’s Hopes for a Rescue in the United States

• Newsweek: 'Permission Slip To Hate Women': TikTok Creators React To Trump Victory

• Semafor: TikTok astrologers are convinced this election isn’t over

• CNN: ‘Your body, my choice’: Attacks on women surge on social media following election

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Thanks again for reading. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump once again surprised many political watchers and swept every battleground state to win a second term. It was a shock ending to an already wild campaign cycle.

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Many Americans no doubt found out about the result on TikTok, where traditional media brands shared the news, MAGA accounts rejoiced, and liberals raged. In the hours after his election was called, here are some of the biggest takes about him blowing up on the platform.

No surprise here: the most-viewed post (over 22 million views) breaking the news of Trump’s victory came from conservative tabloid the @dailymail, which posted a supportive montage featuring two words: Trump’s back!

@dailymailTrump returns to the White House as the 47th President of the United States after being shot, put on trial, and lots of dancing. Read the full story on DailyMail.com #news #kamala #election2024 #politics #trump #democrats #republican

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The next most-viewed post came from liberal creator Dean Withers (@itsdeaann), sharing a straight-to-camera, matter-of-fact statement about what it means for women and girls, tax policy, and other issues progressives care about. His video has received over 18 million views. 

@itsdeaannTrump will be the 47th President of the United States of America.

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A few of @teamtrump’s celebratory posts received tens of millions of views, including their initial victory post (16 million views) and this carousel taking a victory lap (10.5 million views). 

Other Trump supporters took to the platform to celebrate. @papaw_mark got 3.9 million views on a video saying he can’t wait to watch the women of The View cry about this. And in peak dystopian vibes (for us), @emmajulovee got 2.3 million views on a video of her telling her little sister (who is quite young and a massive Trump fan) that he won.

On the Left, pro-Harris creator @harryjsisson announced that “tonight, we failed women” to 4.8 million viewers. Meanwhile, @meyechelgossips reacted to far-right Nick Fuentes gloating about the results, receiving 8 million views. @cjbakerfitness also mourned the Trump win and broke down what the result means for policies many Americans care about (5.4 million views). 

This election was fought on many different battlefields, including TikTok. Week after week, we found that Trump was mentioned significantly more by TikTok users than Harris, but those mentions were often far more negative or unfavorable to his candidacy. 

The Trump campaign’s owned content, however, surged in popularity in the campaign’s final weeks. Their final Election Day message, set to “The Macarena,” received over 118 million views, and the @teamtrump account surpassed @kamalahq in terms of followers on Election Day, despite a lengthy headstart from Team Harris. 

There will be lots more analysis to do in the coming days, and next week, we’ll be back in your inbox with a few more charts and data to share the most impactful moments on TikTok this election cycle. Until then, try to take care of yourself, and maybe log off of TikTok this weekend. 

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We’re just a few short days out from Election Day, and the campaigns are sprinting to the finish. Both sides are hosting mega rallies, running round-the-clock canvassing efforts, and rolling out celebrity endorsements online and off. On TikTok, we’re continuing to see some of the same trends that we’ve been watching for months. Here’s what you need to know this week: 

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Getting Out The Vote on TikTok

Both campaigns are in full Get Out The Vote mode - the phase of the race where they focus on mobilizing their supporters to get to the polls or return their ballots. We’ve been working with our friends at Zelf to try to get a better sense of what the final days look like for each campaign’s mobilization efforts on TikTok.

Here are some of the top (and most viral) moments: @timwalz gave a little football halftime speech to rev up a crowd of supporters in Michigan to put in extra effort and reach their friends and neighbors. That clip racked up over 1.5 million views. @thecharliekirkshow shared  a “special message from President Trump” with YMCA BLARING in the background as the camera panned and former President Trump spoke directly to the camera imploring people to vote – the video is up to over 1 million views. 

Notably, @sashrosekhatami, a 24-year-old digital marketing coordinator and Kamala stan, has been crushing the GOTV game this week. Over the last few weeks, she’s done 8 GOTV posts, racking up 604.5K views and over 100K engagements, pushing her viewers to head to the polls. Here are two fun ones, each of which has amassed a ton of likes and views, where she danced and lip-synced to the audio of CasaDi’s remix of “Kamala Did You Vote Are You Gonna Vote For Me.” That trending audio has been used in around 3,000 videos. 

Garbage in Madison Square Garden

Donald Trump took his circus to Madison Square Garden on Sunday, hosting a wild rally all afternoon that was compared to a Nazi rally that took place in the same venue in the 1930s. The entire event featured a bunch of racist, misogynistic weirdos… which, to be fair, isn’t really new for a Trump rally. One particular joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe early in the night exploded across social media and the news cycle, in which he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” 

With just days to go before Election Day, the Trump camp spent time scrambling with the fallout… especially since a whole lot of Puerto Ricans vote in key swing states.

There’s been a lot of reporting on prominent Puerto Ricans like rapper and superstar Bad Bunny using this opportunity to endorse Kamala Harris. 

By our count, at least a dozen videos about the incident each received over a million views. For example, this post of the joke itself from @kamalahq was seen 7.9 million times and this post comparing the Trump and Harris campaigns’ stances on Puerto Rico from them got 3.2 million views. @dailymail had two posts about the incident cross the million view threshold. This video of Gov Tim Walz and Rep AOC’s response to the joke received 3.7 million views, and they also shared a clip of Hinchcliffe making another racist joke about Latinos as a whole at the Trump rally, which received 1.9 million views.

Whether or not this moment will matter on November 5 remains to be seen. But it’s undeniably something that the Trump campaign would rather not be dealing with in the campaign’s final stretch.

Beyonce, Rogan, and Eminem

Campaigns are also relying on celebrity endorsements and big media appearances to steal the media spotlight in the election’s final stretch. Last weekend we saw Trump go on Rogan, Beyonce endorse Harris, and Eminem introduce Barack Obama. On Monday, we sent out a quick roundup of how those moments performed on TikTok - you can read that analysis right here. 

Trump continues to lead on mentions

Each week, we’ve shared how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we’ve continued to see there are tens of thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That trend continues into the campaign’s closing days:

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the top-performing content about him on TikTok has been negative or unfavorable to his candidacy. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. 

Here’s what that looks like over time:

Last week, the sentiment of posts mentioning Harris was overwhelmingly positive, while Trump was back underwater. 

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 32.9K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 842.9 million views. 

21% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 2% were neutral, and 77% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

While Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico joke made the rounds, he made a lot of other gross and inappropriate jokes too! The top post mentioning Harris this week came from @dailymail and it was Hinchliffe comparing the Democrat Party to the Diddy Party. (Just a reminder that Trump and Diddy were actually friends.)

It also notably feels like @msnbc is starting to hit its TikTok stride these days. They have two of the top three most-viewed Harris posts this week, one showing Beyoncé at the Houston rally and one showing Michelle Obama speaking at a joint rally with the VP. The next largest post came from @couriernewsroom and also showed Michelle Obama’s now iconic remarks at a rally in Michigan.

A few celebrities made it into this week’s top 10. Here’s a post from @teamtrump of scandal-free-and-always-classy (please note the sarcasm!) Mel Gibson saying Harris has the IQ of a fence post, and here’s a video from @9new of Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio throwing their support behind Harris.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 82.7K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1.4 billion views.

59% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, and 41% were positive (with a negligible amount of neutral posts). These were some of the most-viewed:

Three of the top four posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week came from @dailymail. The top two were about his interview with Joe Rogan and the third was the clip of Hinchcliffe comparing the Democrat party to the Diddy party. (Note: All of these were also already mentioned above.) 

@dailymail had another relevant viral clip, showing a tourist who flew all the way from Japan to attend a Trump rally.

Another very popular video last week came from @jubilee of a trans man dragging Ben Shapiro over abortion rights during a debate. 

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

And here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 312 million new views and posted 113 videos.

The top two posts from Team Kamala were both about the racism on full display at Trump’s MSG rally. This one got 14.7 million views and this one another 10.6 million views. 

The next three most popular posts all included an Obama, either Michelle or Barack. You can see those here, here, and here.

They also racked up some big numbers with this “new Kamala ad” making fun of Trump for being old and incoherent.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 327 million new views across their accounts and posted 51 new videos. 

Team Trump’s biggest video is Donald telling Rogan he wants to get rid of income taxes.

Three of the next four biggest posts are short clips of Harris intended to make her look stupid to the same old problematic tune of “New Kamala accent just dropped,” “Lol what a mess,” and “She is not ok.”

And finally, here’s a clip from Team Trump of Trump walking out at MSG. For some reason, they felt the need to bring Beyonce (sic - their misspelling) into the caption.

Creator Spotlight: @tegreacts

Tega Orhorhoro, aka @tegreacts, is a popular TikTok creator who mixes humor with current events. She’s amassed 3.7 million followers and 209 million likes.

Tega focuses on making news accessible and relatable to younger audiences, often using comedy sketches and reactions to highlight the stories of the day. 

Here she is responding to Donald Trump saying he’s not involved with Project 2025, here she is responding to some rampant sexism, and here she is pushing the importance of voting. 

She keeps it light but definitely isn’t afraid to weigh in on heavier subjects.

News & platform updates

• Was that endorsement video a sign of organic support or paid sponsorship? We’ll never know!

• TikTok’s founder just became the richest man in China. Maybe this platform has legs after all.

• Want to feel old? This new trend has Gen Z listening to Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that made big waves in 2016 on TikTok… for the first time!

• The lawsuits keep stacking up against TikTok for not protecting minors.

• The Washington Post was told not to endorse in this year’s presidential election. But it would seem Jeff Bezos has no idea what WaPo’s team is doing on TikTok.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

A lot happened on the campaign trail and online over the weekend, and with just over a week to go until Election Day, we wanted to quickly share additional insights into what we’re seeing on TikTok for several of the campaign’s key moments. Here we go:

Beyonce was a bit of a bust

The Bey-hive may be upset to learn that while it made for a stellar rally and a solid jolt to the political news cycle, Beyonce’s marquee endorsement of Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday night was not a huge hit on TikTok. 

The most viewed video featuring the Beyonce rally on TikTok was this clip shared by @MSNBC, which has received over 11 million views. Other top performers were this quick video from a rally attendee (viewed over 5 million times), and this @cbsnews clip of Queen B’s speech. 

Over on the @kamalahq account, the Beyonce rally content was decidedly *not viral,* a handful of clips received modest success - several million views in total: 

Maybe there’s a simple logistical reason for that: having a high profile celebrity moment occur after 9pm ET on a Friday night (of Halloween weekend, no less) could have pushed down the view counts. 

…But Obama and Eminem made it happen

By comparison, content from former President Obama’s Michigan rally the night before with rapper Eminem performed much better - both for the campaign’s own accounts and across TikTok. This video of Obama rapping has over 40 million views, and this clip of Eminem introducing Obama has been seen over 13 million times. 

A video of the Eminem-Obama intro posted by @kamalahq has racked up more than 12 million views, and this one of Eminem’s speech has been seen 5 million times. @thedemocrats also shared a video of the Eminem event, receiving over 5 million views. 

Trump’s three hours with Rogan

On the Right, Trump’s much hyped, high-profile, three hour-long interview with Joe Rogan failed to really resonate on TikTok, although it was widely seen and listened to on other platforms like YouTube. 

The most watched clip from that interview shared on TikTok was this video of Trump and Rogan talking about the former President’s ear scar, which has now been seen over 16 million times. Another was this clip of Trump mentioning an off the cuff plan to get rid of all income taxes (and institute massive tariffs instead) which received about 14 million views. Another clip from @couriernewsroom that showed Rogan “caught off guard by Trump’s incoherence” received about 4 million views, and this hit from @kamalahq about Trump losing the 2020 election was watched more than 3 million times. 

For three hours of content, one would expect a whole lot more viral clips to be moving around the internet. Instead, it seems like Trump has done so many of these shock-jock style podcast interviews recently that the format is becoming a little stale for him, and viewers on platforms like TikTok may be starting to tune out. 

That’s all for now, we’ll be back in your inboxes on Thursday with a full roundup of data and analysis from TikTok this week. 💥

This week, Donald Trump played dress up at the fry station and drive-through window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. The stunt (which was carefully choreographed by his campaign and took place while the McDonald’s location was closed for normal business) was widely mocked by late-night hosts and liberal pundits on Twitter. But, while some on the left were laughing, the moment spread like wildfire on TikTok, where users were eager to watch, like, comment, and share. 

This post from the @realdonaldtrump account received almost 40 million views and 4.5 million likes, and a few others from @teamtrump earned a combined 100 million views. Other top posts about the visit came from @dailymail. Here’s Trump learning to pack fries with 13.4 million views and 439.8K likes, here he is serving happy customers with 7.3 million views and 388.3K likes, and here’s a bit of viral misinformation questioning whether or not Kamala Harris had ever worked at McDonald's (Fact check: she did.) 

Notably, another big McDonald’s-related post came from @cbsnews, showing someone asking Trump – while in his apron – if he supported raising the minimum wage and Trump refusing to answer. One other interesting note: this story really seemed to resonate with Spanish-speaking TikTok. Several of the top posts (from @joaixy_zu, @tromepe, and @eyrnews) were in Spanish.

While the reception of Trump’s “cosplay-as-a-minimum-wage-working-person” scheme wasn’t all positive, it’s pretty clear this stunt played well on TikTok for the former President. In part because of Trump’s 15 minutes of McFame, the @teamtrump account received more total video views last week (nearly 300 million) than @kamalaharris, @kamalahq, and @realdonaldtrump combined. 

That also had an overall impact on our sentiment analysis tracking: For the first time in months, the majority of top-performing posts mentioning Trump were positive or favorable to his candidacy. 

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we continue to see there are tens of thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - as today’s topper clearly demonstrates, his comments and extreme positions – as well as his ability to create viral moments – dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the top-performing content about him on TikTok has been negative or unfavorable to his candidacy. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. 

Here’s what that looks like over time:

As we mentioned at the top, this was Trump’s best week on the platform in months. He still trails Harris overall, but just barely. Can he hold this spike in positive content until Election Day? We’ll see. 

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 33.1K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 469.1 million views. 

25% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 6% were neutral, and 68% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

The most-viewed video last week mentioning Harris, as we outlined above, was from @realdonaldtrump working at McDonald’s and claiming he’s the only one on the ballot to have done so.

The next biggest was a neutral post from @nbcnews with 14.5 million views and 1.2 million likes about a bakery that puts the candidates’ faces on their cookies and the blowback they’ve been receiving this year for something they’ve been doing since 1996.

Other notable top posts about Harris this week include this powerful post from @msnbc asking a member of the trans community what question they would ask the two candidates, which got 14.2 million views and 1.3 million likes, and this post from @usher with a funny interaction between him and Harris that racked up 11.4 million views and 2 million likes.

@foxnews also posted the full 26-minute interview between VP Harris and Brett Baier, which performed really well, with 12.9 million views and 632K likes, for a video that’s much, much longer than other content on the app.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 92K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 925.2 million views.

40% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 1% were neutral and 59% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

This week’s most-viewed post mentioning Trump (excluding his own content) came from @sm.swagger and it showed Trump dancing to a rewrite of the Macarena, declaring that “Kamala’s never gonna beat me in November.” It has received 19 million views and 2.6 million likes.

@maga had a massive clip showing JD Vance declaring that Jesus is King that got 10.2 million views and 1.9 million likes, and @kamalaharris herself made the list with a viral clip of Mark Cuban laughing at Trump’s “economic gibberish” that has 8.2 million views and 1 million likes.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

You’ll notice that @realdonaldtrump’s account officially hit a billion views this week. And @teamtrump, by far the youngest of the four accounts, is also well on its way to surpassing the billion view marker.

And here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 123 million new views and posted 61 videos.

Their top post of the week was the one we mentioned above of Mark Cuban mocking Trump’s economic plans. That was followed by them sharing a clip of Trump on The Five saying he’ll defund public schools that don’t obey him.

That was followed by a clip of Tim Walz calling Elon Musk a dipshit and talking about the danger Musk and Trump pose if they win.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 380 million new views across their accounts and posted 51 new videos. 

Three of their top four posts were about his time at McDonald’s. 

The other post in their top 4 posts this week showed Trump checking in with WWE’s Undertaker, and their 5th biggest post showed him at the Al Smith Dinner. 

Creator Spotlight: @itsdeaann

We mentioned @itsdeaann above, so we figured we should check in and make sure this young creator is on your radar. Dean Withers has 1.1 million followers and 12.3 million likes.

He does create his own content, but many of his viral moments happen in clips like the @nowthisimpact one shared above. He’s young – just 20 years old – but speaks with the confidence of someone who’s been at this for decades. He really popped up as part of a Jubilee debate roundtable where he went up against 20 Trump supporters and demonstrated an impressive grasp of the facts. You can see examples of that Jubilee debate here, here, and here.

He’s also produced viral content trolling Trump supporters at a rally and asking Trump supporters to debate him. Like a lot of young internet bros, Dean has not been without his controversy, however. It was revealed back in October that he had posted anti-LGBTQ+ and racist slurs online when he was 18. He has since publicly apologized and said that he posted them before he became a progressive.  

News & platform updates

• There’s some internal sabotage at ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.

• TikTok is bringing STEM to more users.

• Duolingo might need to add TikTok-speak to its list of languages.

• We hope this goes without saying, but please don’t believe everything you see on TikTok. 

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

Last week, we published a deep dive into the biggest attacks on Harris rolling around TikTok over the past few months. This week, we’re doing the same for Donald Trump.

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Here are a few takeaways:

The debate was a singularly bad moment for Trump on TikTok

The biggest topline in our analysis is that however bad we may think the September 10th presidential debate was for Donald Trump, when we look at TikTok, it was actually much, much worse. Of the top 40 most viral posts unfavorable to Donald Trump on TikTok over the last 60 days, nearly half were about the debate. All four of the most viewed negative videos came from that key campaign moment. 

The most viewed posts showed footage of Trump being slowly dismantled by Harris or fact-checked by the moderators. For example, @nbcnews received over 55 million views on a clip of Harris refuting Trump’s claims that she would take people’s guns and @msnbc received over 45 million views on a video of Trump being fact-checked over his Springfield, Ohio lie. Two more of these top-performing videos came from @thedailyshow: one about Trump acting like he lost after the debate and one about Trump’s wild “they’re eating the pets” lie. Two other top negative Trump videos also poked that insane falsehood: this one from @luisamaria232323 shows some nervous pets and this one from @magnusthetherapydog took the satire to a new level.

Barack mocks Trump on whining, crowd size, and the economy

When former President Barack Obama speaks, TikTok tunes in. Several of the most-viewed negative videos mentioning Trump featured Obama mocking him on anything from crowd size to Trump taking credit for Obama’s economy. This cut of Obama’s DNC speech from @msnbc received over 22 million views and 2 million likes. Another Obama video from @nowthisimpact received 13 million views, and this additional campaign trail clip from @msnbc has racked up over 14 million views. 

Users care about abortion rights

TikTok users, like most Americans, are deeply worried about Trump’s attacks on reproductive freedom, and many have taken to the platform to hit Trump on the issue. This heart-wrenching abortion story told by popular progressive creator @chrisdmowrey has been viewed over 17 million times. This ad shared by @kamalahq featuring the painful story of Hadley Duvall has been watched on TikTok 13 million times, and this popular stitch trend featured women sharing their abortion stories while attacking Trump and his MAGA allies. 

Trump’s bizarre statements go viral

As we’ve been noting for weeks, Trump’s fitness to serve and mental decline has been a top trending issue on political TikTok this year. The @kamalahq account has had some major success clipping footage of Trump’s most bizarre speeches and spreading them far and wide. The most viewed slip-up by the former President is this moment when he referred to musician Nicky Jam as a woman and said “she’s hot,” receiving over 22 million views, and a clip of another weird racist moment was viewed around 10 million times. Another clip from @msnbc received 16 million views when it highlighted “Trump’s WEIRD AZ rally.” 

When looking at raw view counts, we’re consistently seeing that popular news brands - not individual creators - are really driving the bulk of the TikTok conversation about both candidates, but especially Donald Trump. Brands like @msnbc, @thedailyshow, @dailymail, @cnn, @nbcnews, and @nowthisimpact are chronicling the daily news cycle on the platform, and many of their videos are reaching tens of millions of people. 

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we continue to see there are thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - as today’s toppers clearly demonstrate, his comments and extreme positions dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the content about him on TikTok has historically been negative. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. Here’s what that looks like over time:

Two weeks ago, we saw Trump spike and Harris dive. Then, last week, we reported that it seemed more like a blip than a vibe shift. This week seems to demonstrate that our analysis was correct. All told the vibe for Harris on TikTok remains far stronger than the vibes for Trump.

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 24.6K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 347.2 million views. 

38% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 4% were neutral, and 59% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

The biggest attack against Harris on TikTok this week came from @dailymail, showing a clip of Dennis Quaid speaking at Trump’s rally in Coachella asking if “we’re going to be a nation that stands for the constitution or for TikTok.” 🤔 

As you might imagine, the comments were brutal (and pretty pro-Kamala or maybe just anti-Dennis Quaid). One of the top comments read: “Ironically, this is posted on TikTok.”  That comment got 22.8K likes. 

The Trump campaign made the list three times – all negative for the VP, of course. Also on the Right, @thecharliekirkshow continues to milk his college “debate me bro” tour for some serious viral juice. 

Former President Obama is featured in two of the top 10 clips, showing the staying power of his influence.  This clip of Obama bashing Trump from @abcnews got over 7 million views and this one of Obama calling Trump a bully from @cbsnews got 6.8 million views.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 74.6K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 756 million views.

66% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 1% were neutral and 33% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

That heavily–roasted Dennis Quaid clip from @dailymail that we talked about above was also the top Trump-related post this week. All told, it seems to be a highly polarizing video and it got 64.3K comments… which is a lot!

Barack Obama made the list of top-performing Trump content with his comments bashing Trump four times and President Biden made the list once, the latter telling former President Trump to “get a life” in response to Trump spreading hurricane misinformation – the clip was posted by @msnbc and has 7.3 million views.

@kamalahq is on there twice, once with a clip of Trump saying he can only see the Black people at his rally and one mocking his makeup.

@foxnews also made the list with a clip of Trump saying we’re going to give the death penalty to “any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.” We’re counting this as a positive video for him and his base… but, for us and, we assume, many voters, it’s definitely not a positive look. 

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week remains Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

With exceptions around major events like the debate or the conventions, Fitness to Serve has been by far the top issue of the entire campaign.

The top post in the category this week was @realdonaldtrump showing a clip of Trump at a rally playing a clip of Harris saying she wouldn’t have done anything differently these last 4 years. That post got 13.4 million views and 1.9 million likes.

Second on the list was that clip of @kamalahq mocking Trump’s makeup, racking up 10.2 million views and 1.4 million likes.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

…and here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 228.5 million new views and posted 88 videos.

Following those two viral hits about Trump’s makeup and about Trump saying he can only see the Black people shared above, their third most popular post also mocked Trump’s makeup.

Their next most popular post, with 6 million views and 664.1K likes, shows VP Harris watching a clip of Trump attacking Detroit and then responding accordingly.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 169.1 million new views across their accounts and posted 44 new videos.

@teamtrump got some big numbers on TikTok by sharing a clip of SNL making fun of Harris. What they obviously don’t show is that that same clip also mocks Trump… which is some fairly selective editing 🧐

@teamtrump also had another big post that mocked Harris for using fake accents in front of different crowds – the post has received 9.3 million views.

Creator Spotlight: @brettcooper_

@brettcooper_ is a conservative content creator with 1.1 million followers and 25 million likes on TikTok.

In her early 20s, she spent time trying to be an actor before becoming a conservative commentator. Her YouTube show, “The Comments Section with Brett Cooper” is produced by The Daily Wire and has millions of followers.

She’s brought her same energy and passion for conservative issues to TikTok. Here she is using a very common GOP talking point about the draft in response to VP Harris’ comments on Call Her Daddy and here’s one of her splicing together Joe Biden looking confused at the debate.

Not all of her content is directly political (although it seems like almost all of it contains undertones). She also weighs in on cultural and social issues. Here she is hating on women for being into toxic men. And here she is loving “retail therapy”  as a capitalist to 1.3 million viewers.

News & platform updates

• Get ready for some videos attacking Jill Stein as a scammer to hit your FYP.

• According to the Wall Street Journal, we’re living in a whole new media landscape. Walter Cronkite is gone – people are now turning to @underthedesknews.

• Americans are getting their news online. But the “typical US adult” still doesn’t follow journalists or politicians on TikTok.

• Is Nutter Butter okay? Define okay.

• TikTok, as you might have already suspected, seems to be boosting attractive people.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

Every week, we try to spotlight the most viral posts about the presidential candidates and put data behind the vibes of what’s trending on political TikTok. 

Over the past few weeks of tracking, a few common lines of attack have emerged against both candidates. Today, we’ll share the most common negative themes and lines of attack from TikTok creators against Vice President Harris, and next week we’ll do the same for Trump. 

Of the most viewed 40 posts attacking Harris, twelve came from the Trump campaign’s official accounts (@realdonaldtrump or @teamtrump), two came from Vance’s account (@jd), and two more from @maga (run by a Donald Trump Super PAC). So, a good portion of the top hits against VP Harris came directly from the Trump universe.

Some of those top attack posts include this one of VP Harris getting “fact-checked,” this one of Trump promising to fix grocery prices and make them more affordable, and this one of VP Harris defending immigrants. 

But the account spreading the most viral anti-Harris content – by far – was the British tabloid @dailymail. We’ve highlighted them before, and as we’ve noted, they have gotten very good at finding provocative moments – sometimes fair, sometimes not – that resonate with the TikTok algorithm. Some examples of their top anti-Harris posts include a clip of Elon Musk saying this will be “the last election” if Trump doesn’t win, a post about VP Harris’s “fake accent,” and a video of WH Press Sec Karine Jean-Pierre clapping back at those accent allegations.

It’s worth mentioning that two of those three posts – which have received hundreds of thousands of likes and views – revolve around Kamala Harris using accents with different crowds. Attacks on Harris’ allegedly fake accents continue to bubble up among right-wing creators on TikTok and across other social media platforms. 

Another account that has seen enormous amounts of views and engagement on anti-Harris content is @thecharliekirkshow, which uses a signature “debate me bro” approach, like this one of him debating a “White Dude for Harris” and this one of him debating a trans person, to hack the algo. There are a few more names on the list of accounts that have launched high-performing videos that are negative about VP Harris that you’ll recognize — like @nypost, @danbonginox, and @joepags. 

Here’s one from @thatonearmedguyontiktok - a former Democrat - talking about why he’s now a Trump supporter. This post got 10.6 million views and nearly a million likes.

Other examples include a video from @drdeedeecurtis giving Kamala Harris a message from “a black woman” talking about the racial component of her campaign, which got almost 9 million views and over 870K likes, and a video from @karacory lifting up Donald Trump mocking VP Harris repeating her thank yous at the DNC to 7.4 million viewers. Here’s one from @_amandastout showing her brother doing a pretty solid – but certainly unflattering – Harris impression for 6.3 million viewers.

As we’ve been finding week after week, the vibes have generally been positive for Harris and less so for Trump on TikTok. But this type of content has been fed to hundreds of millions of people on TikTok these last few months, showing Harris at her worst, using racist or sexist attacks to mock and belittle her, and generally talking about why she wouldn’t be a good Commander in Chief.

Next week we’ll be doing the same for Donald Trump. If you haven’t already subscribed, make sure you do: 

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we continue to see there are thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - his bizarre comments and extreme positions dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the content about him on TikTok has historically been negative. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. Here’s what that looks like over time:

Last week was the first time we saw Harris underwater in Zelf’s sentiment analysis and we wondered if that was a blip or a vibe shift. While it’s too soon to say declaratively, it’s looking more like a blip. Her sentiment score took a dive last week, but this week, it’s right back on track with where it’s been throughout the campaign.

Interestingly, Trump had a quick spike last week, putting him even with Harris for the first time since she entered the race. But like her blip, his spike hasn’t held.

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 17.3K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 329.3 million views. 

32% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 2% were neutral, and 66% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

We opened today’s newsletter reflecting on the many hits on VP Harris currently rolling around TokTok. But as you can see, this week was very positive for the Harris campaign overall.

@dailymail had two negative clips hit the top ten — the top post of the week was them sharing a clip of Elon Musk speaking at a Trump rally and then they also shared a top-performing video of Harris talking about federal relief for hurricane victims and questioning if $750 was enough for families who lost everything.

The only other hit in today’s top 10 was from @teamtrump, which was a video of Kamala “malfunctioning after her teleprompter stops working.” (Didn’t seem too bad to us, but it did get almost 12 million views, and the comments seem pretty rough.)

@60minutes made the top chart three times following their recent interview with VP Harris. One clip was them explaining why Harris was appearing on the program and Trump wasn’t, and two of them were Harris talking policy with their team. 

This carousel from @2024voteharris also made the top chart. The most interesting part about it was that it was two posts of the exact same photo and that’s it. Yet that didn’t stop it from racking up 5.5 million views. @nowthisimpact also had a top-performing clip of Mark Cuban talking about how Trump favored oil companies over working families.

All in all, it was a good week for the Vice President on TikTok.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 42.4K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 775.5 million views.

68% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative and 32% were positive (with a negligible amount of neutral posts about him). These were some of the most-viewed:

Four of this week’s top posts mentioning Donald Trump were positive and three of those four (two from @dailymail, and one from @cbsnews) were about Elon Musk attending Donald Trump’s rally in Butler.

The only other positive post was @msnbc sharing a clip of Melania Trump’s recent interview with Fox where she says she is pro-choice and claims her husband respects her opinion. 

@nowthisimpact made the list twice, both showing clips of Mark Cuban talking about how bad Donald Trump is for working families. We shared one above. Here’s the other.

And the only neutral post on this week’s top Trump content chart is from @babylovelife90. It’s weird… but adorable.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week remains Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

With exceptions around major events like the debate or the conventions, Fitness to Serve has been by far the top issue of the entire campaign.

The top post in the category this week was @kamalahq sharing a clip of Donald Trump talking about the hurricane and saying “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.” 

On the flip side, here’s another top video in this category from @teamtrump with a clip of Trump hitting VP Harris on the administration’s hurricane response. 

Speaking of Trump, @dashdobrofsky also shared a video in disbelief as Donald Trump, “a draft dodger,” awarded himself a Purple Heart. This video was seen over 2 million times.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

…and here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 159 million new views and posted 66 videos.

Their top post of the week was the one about Trump talking about this being the “wettest hurricane we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water” which we noted above.

Their second biggest post – seen 9.5 million times and with 1.4 million likes – was VP Harris telling 60 Minutes what kind of gun she owns (spoilers: it’s a Glock).

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 158 million new views across their accounts and posted 32 new videos.

Their top post of the week was the one we also highlighted above showing Harris after her teleprompter stopped working, followed by another video we highlighted above of Donald Trump slamming Harris regarding hurricane relief.

Those were followed by a short clip of VP Harris on the Call Her Daddy podcast superimposed over footage showing people struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Creator Spotlight: @donaldjtrumpjr

You obviously know Don Jr. He’s a vocal and prominent part of the Trump universe. But he plays an interesting role on TikTok as @donaldjtrumpjr, where he humanizes his dad and attacks their collective enemies to his 1.3 million followers.

He does the classics, like sharing tweets, and posting clips of himself on the news. But he also brings a different level of intimacy to the platform that seems aimed to soften the Trump brand with their MAGA loyalists.

Here he is on a hunting trip in Colorado. Here he is hanging with Dad at the courthouse, where Don Senior talks about how proud he is of Don Jr. This post – seen over 2.6 million times – seems to be an unmarked sponsored post for Emirates Airlines, but mostly he’s just showing how swanky his accommodations are during a short trip to the Middle East. Here he is in Wisconsin (at a Culver’s no less!) attacking Biden and RFK Jr on climate.

Does he give off overwhelming Kendall Roy energy on his feed? Without question!

But it’s a softer, gentler version of Don Jr. than the one we’re used to from Twitter or Fox News. And it’s clearly resonating as he’s racked up almost 10 million likes on the platform to date since joining TikTok in late May of this year.

News & platform updates

• New research from Pew found that US adults follow accounts about pop culture and entertainment much more than those posting about news or politics.

• TikTok has enabled individual creators to become a truly trusted source of news.

• Harris’s memes work where Biden’s fell short.

• There are no political ads on TikTok… in theory.

• Some TikTok investors are investing in Trump.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

On Tuesday night, vice presidential hopefuls JD Vance and Tim Walz took the stage for their only debate of the election cycle. The tone was very different than anything we’ve seen in political debates since Donald Trump rode down that escalator so many years ago.

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Despite the fact that these two actually disagree on virtually every topic, the debate was cordial – almost friendly at times. Vance even said he agreed with Walz on a host of issues and expressed sympathy after Walz told a story about his son witnessing a shooting. 

With this ~context~, let’s check in on how the debate played out on TikTok:

The Fact Check 

There were a lot of establishment media accounts sharing the moment the moderators fact-checked Vance and he replied that the rules promised no fact-checking. Posts about this moment from @dailymail, @msnbc, and @cbsnews, to name a few, garnered a good amount of attention and likes. 

There were also a lot of responses to this from the right: @TeamTrump themselves posted a video calling it a “false fact check” and an account called @trump4boston claimed that JD Vance fact-checked the moderators right back (you know… by saying they weren’t supposed to fact-check him 🧐).

Over on the Left, @dinoburlesoni posted a funny take on the moment. 

The Eyeliner

A running topic throughout the campaign has been around Vance’s alleged use of eyeliner. TikTok users had some thoughts and feelings. For example, this post from @famousblonde, which parodies Vance getting ready for the debate, is now up to 1.8 million views and almost 250,000 likes. 

Other popular videos on the topic came from @melissaann1214 wondering how many Sephora points Vance has, from @krisjennersdiary which also calls out Vance’s attacks against drag, and from @eanenot which features some adorable pups to make its point.

The 2020 Election

So, did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? JD Vance would prefer to focus on the future – and not answer the question.

That specific moment from the VP debate racked up some big views. Examples of videos about it popping off include this one from @msnbc and this one from @cbsnews. And btw, @rn_tina17 posted a video with a response to JD Vance’s intentional non-answer.

“We Have A Lot To Cover”

@msnbc posted a particularly powerful clip where they checked in with a student at Oakland University in Michigan who had a poignant response to JD Vance’s constant rejoinder that VP Harris hasn’t already gotten the job done. And if you want to catch the whole debate edited down to just 5 minutes, the team at @couriernewsroom has you covered!

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we continue to see there are thousands more posts about Donald Trump than about Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - his bizarre comments and extreme positions dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the content about him on TikTok has historically been negative. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. Here’s what that looks like over time:

Last week was the first week we’ve seen in our tracking that a majority of top posts mentioning Harris were not favorable to her candidacy. Is that a sign of a bigger vibe shift, or just a temporary blip? We’ll know more in the coming weeks. 

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 17.9K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 317.5 million views. 

49% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 7% were neutral, and 44% were positive. 

These were some of the most viewed:

The vibes were not nearly as good for Harris this week on TikTok as they have been.

Five of the top ten most-viewed posts mentioning her came from @maga, @realdonaldtrump, or @teamtrump, including posts of a kid roasting her, criticizing her stance on Iran, and accusing her of covering things up during the Biden-Harris administration. 

On top of that, a few of the top posts – one from @dailymail and one from @cnn –  featured Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris “mentally impaired.” 

While it’s not directly about Kamala Harris, it should be mentioned that Tim Walz did have a big non-debate moment this week, when he and his dog Scout checked in with @weratedogs and their 2.6 million followers.

If you aren’t familiar with the account, the host meets dogs, pets them and rates them. All ratings are positive – it’s a very wholesome, pro-dog account.

They actually shared five videos with Tim Walz and his rescue dog, Scout, racking up over 1.75 million total views (you check them all out here).

In case it isn’t obvious, none of those posts about Scout Walz are remotely political. It’s probably safe to bet that this kind of content – humanizing the candidates and showing them in their element – probably moves the needle more than any interviews or policy rollouts with undecided voters on a platform like TikTok.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 49K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 687.1 million views.

52% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 5% were neutral, and 43% were positive. 

These were some of the most-viewed:

The top post about Donald Trump this week came from @dailymail and it was him talking about… er… ummm… how beautiful his body is.

Another popular clip came from @msnbc of Donald Trump telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that “it takes two to tango” as he bragged about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. @skynews had a top-perfoming longer clip from that same exchange with Zelenskyy.

This popular clip from @msnbc is of an interview with two little girls who are excited about Donald Trump lowering taxes… and the price of Barbies. 

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was once again Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

As has been the norm throughout the entire cycle, the issue of the candidates' “Fitness to Serve” continues to dominate the political conversation on TikTok. 

A Story In Two Top Posts

In this post from @teamtrump, which has over 2.6 million views, Donald Trump claims that Joe Biden is sleeping and unavailable to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

@msnbc actually showed the same clip but included a fact check where they cut to Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp saying he just spoke with President Biden. It then cuts to Biden stating outright that Donald Trump was lying. That video rivals the first in terms of attention, with over 2.4 million views.

And in terms of the other top videos, @thedailyshow got 2.2 million views on a notable edit showing Donald Trump saying he’d only tell the story of his assassination attempt once, followed up by him talking about it 30 more times.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

…and here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 35 million new views and posted 51 videos.

Their top post of the week – with 5.5 million views and 717.1K likes –  was Vance objecting to be fact checked with the caption “lol he’s mad.” 

Their next biggest post was VP Harris getting off a plane in Arizona and saluting a nearby officer. The post, which is simply captioned “It’s good to be back in Arizona,” is 12 seconds long, has no music or sound effects, and she never even looks to the camera. Impressively, it still has 3.5 million views and 167.6K likes.

That was followed by a quirky photo carousel post about Trump’s proposed tequila tax which got 1.9 million views and 235.7K likes and then a clip of Trump denying people leave his rallies early, with a video of people actively leaving his rally, which garnered 1.5 million views and 134.5K likes. The caption is simply “they’re leaving bro.”

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 73 million new views across their accounts and posted 45 new videos.

The top two posts from the Trump campaign both show the former President engaging with Zelensky. In the first – which was 10 million views and 400K likes – they’re simply walking through a lobby together with on-screen text that reads “what real leadership looks like.” The second – which has 8.8 million views and 1 million likes – shows them walking together and then a short, truncated clip of Trump speaking about their meeting. (Never mind that the actual interaction, as detailed above, was a literal nightmare for the Ukrainian leader.)

The third most popular post from Trump this week – with 4.4 million views and 762.2K likes – is a montage of Trump watching a football game and interacting with fans.

Creator Spotlight: @yourpal_austin

Austin Archer, or @yourpal_austin, is a content creator, an actor and a musician, consistently pumping out funny political content. In the process, he’s amassed 1.4 million followers and 43.6 million likes.

He regularly debates with himself, taking two sides of an issue, as a way to show the absurdity of an argument. Here are some examples of these “debates” on Project 2025, the Olympics, and aliens.

He regularly engages his audience, giving deep and (sometimes) thoughtful responses to commenters. He has engaged directly with his audience on the topics of nuance and centrism and why it’s wrong to other trans women and their experiences.

But he also does really fun skits, musical bits and more to share his politics – and his journey – with his audience.

News & platform updates

• While the platform still doesn’t allow political ads, TikTok is rolling out search ads in an ongoing bid to take on Google.

• You might notice some of your favorite songs are no longer available on the platform. (It’s not just you.)

• Congress might be worried about China tracking US citizens. But US citizens… aren’t actually too worried about that.

• Could TikTok creators tip a close presidential election?

• PSA: Just because you CAN re-animate Hitler’s voice using AI to rack up views on TikTok, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

North Carolina is a pivotal swing state in the upcoming presidential election, with the power to potentially hand the election to either Trump or Harris.

While there’s plenty of focus on the presidential race playing out across the Tar Heel State, their gubernatorial campaign – between current Attorney General Josh Stein and current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson – had a massive shake-up this week. CNN discovered that Robinson had made dozens of incredibly disturbing and deeply insensitive comments on porn forums. A few hours later, it came out that Mark Robinson had also been on Ashley Madison, a site for married people looking for affairs. And while this story started in the traditional media, TikTok quickly got into the action.

@scott_c_ shared that Robinson is fully in the Find Out phase now (presumably in reference to the saying, f*** around and find out) and received some pretty good attention on that video. Similarly, @timfullerton, @saira_csu, and @genzperspectivepod all had popular videos breaking down the situation – and the following news that almost all of Robinson’s staff had quit after CNN dropped their story.

People were also quick to get in on the bit: @vinn_ayy had a pretty funny video cosplaying as Mark Robinson’s new campaign manager.

And that’s just individual users. If you take a look at the traditional media outlets sharing the story on TikTok, the number of content views and likes skyrocket.

For example, @cbsmornings received 392k views and 15k likes on their post about how Robinson was refusing to drop out following the news, and @abcworldnews received 718k views and 17k likes on a clip of David Muir breaking down the situation.

And trust us, when it comes to these media outlets getting attention on video about the Mark Robinson story, the list goes on and on. This is actually in keeping with a trend that our friends over at CAP Action have been analyzing: their data shows that media accounts, especially legacy media accounts like CBS, NBC, and The Daily Mail, have seen a huge amount of growth in their TikTok views since that first presidential debate between Trump and Biden really kicked things off – but for individual creators and other accounts that post about politics, growth has actually been pretty flat over that time.

Back on the Mark Robinson story, it’s also worth mentioning that JD Vance has become somewhat dragged into the scandal, after getting asked “if there’s something disqualifying about the comments uncovered by CNN that wasn’t disqualifying by any of the previous comments he made” as well as whether the Trump campaign still endorses Mark Robinson.

Such clips have been shared many, many, many times.

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. As it turns out, week after week, there are thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - his bizarre comments and extreme positions dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

As we’ve noted before, this isn’t necessarily a good thing for Trump. While Donald Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the content about him on TikTok is negative, especially as compared to content about Kamala Harris. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. Here’s what that looks like over time:

We should note that while this data may be imprecise and certainly has a margin for error, it continues to show a trend that the vibes are generally in Harris’ favor and against Donald Trump.

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 18.1K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 447.8 million views. 

31% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 1% were neutral, and 67% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

Did you see the clip of VP Harris telling Oprah that if someone breaks into her house, they’re getting shot? So did 23.7 million viewers from this clip from @dailymail with 1.5 million likes.

@dailymail had another viral clip of someone shouting “felons can’t vote” in reference to Donald Trump, which has 16.2 million views and 1.9 million likes.

Donald Trump, from his account @realdonaldtrump, posted a video where he criticizes Harris for raising prices. In the video, which has 7 million views and 738.3K likes, he’s walking around a grocery store – admitting it’s the first time in a long time he’s done so, and openly breaking the law by handing out cash to potential voters.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 34.1K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 841.3 million views.

64% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 2% were neutral, and 31% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

This week’s top post was the @dailymail clip of someone shouting “felons can’t vote” in reference to Donald Trump that we mentioned above.

@nowthisimpact shared a clip of Rep Crockett ripping into Donald Trump and Project 2025, which has 6.3 million views and 898K likes.

And following the P. Diddy scandal, while videos emerged trying to tie Harris to P. Diddy, they’ve got nothing on this @dailymail clip, with 5.4 million views and 438.5K likes, of Donald Trump defending Diddy on an episode of The Apprentice.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was once again Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The issue of the candidates “fitness to serve” continues to dominate the political conversation on TikTok. 

In what feels like a bit of a callback, one of the top posts in this category came from @dailymail and showed President Biden awkwardly forgetting who he’s introducing to 31.7 million viewers. This is the type of content we saw a ton of before July but haven't had too much of since VP Harris became the nominee.

The next most popular post in this category, with 16.2 million views, was once again that @dailymail clip of something shouting “felons can’t vote.” And finally, @meidastouch posted a video showing pieces of a documentary from Lev Parnas about Donald Trump not knowing anything about Ukraine while serving as President, which has over 4.5 million views.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

…and here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

Last week we mentioned that @kamalahq was about to cross a billion views on the platform. This week, they did it. With the additional views from @kamalaharris, the campaign has received over 1.5 billion lifetime views on its content. 

This week, Harris’ combined TikTok accounts gained 133.1 million new views and posted 38 videos.

Their top post of the week, which featured a fun ditty showing VP Harris wearing a suit and Converse over Demi Lovato’s La La Land (with the line “Who said I can’t wear my Converse with my dress?”), got 21.9 million views and amassed 3.1 million likes. 

Their next most popular post was Donald Trump saying that if he lost, he wouldn’t run again in 4 years, with the tacked-on “I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.” It got 6 million views and 1.1 million likes. That was followed by a photo carousel of Donald Trump and Mark Robinson with 5.4 million views and 601.8K likes.

Another notable post featured Bill Nye the Science Guy talking about climate change and why Donald Trump’s views on the subject are dangerous. It got 3.6 million views and 870.1K likes.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 157.4 million new views across their accounts and posted 39 new videos.

Their top post was Donald Trump delivering a birthday present to Liam, an 8-year-old boy with a brain disease. It got 22.4 million views and 1.9 million likes. 

Their next most popular post showed Pawn Stars Rick Harrison speaking at a Trump rally to 13.1 million viewers and 1.3 million likes. That was followed by a short clip of VP Harris “debuting a Latina accent while speaking to an audience of Hispanics 🥴”. It got 10.1 million views and 771.1K likes. 

Creator Spotlight: @someolddude

He might just be @someolddude (who appears to now be @somepoliticaldude in the lead-up to the election), but he’s got over half a million followers on TikTok and 25.7 million likes.

He started posting in May of 2020 and his first few videos weren’t political at all. But by June, he was interspersing political content like this into the mix and now he’s all in on politics.

He does plenty of straight content, but he also does a lot of character work, including playing a reporter and a “centrist.” He does a lot of videos playing a recurring MAGA character. You can check out a few of those out here, here and here.

The sophistic comment “we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a democratic republic” is such a popular troll across all social media channels – so you know @someolddude had to make a fun response to that old line.

News & platform updates

• Could creators save TikTok? They’re trying.

• McEntee and Masterson are apparently two sides of the same coin. Got it?

• Come across a gross and not-so-believable story about VP Harris in your feed recently? The person posting it might have been getting paid to do so.

• TikTok is expanding its subscription features for creators.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

You might not know the name John McEntee. But if you spend much time on TikTok, you probably know his face. His handle is @daterightstuff and he has amassed over 3.3 million followers on the platform. Back in 2022, he started a conservative dating app and mostly used TikTok to document his struggles as a conservative looking for love. 

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But aside from being a lonely man on a journey to find love, McEntee also served as the Director of the White House Personnel Office under President Trump and he’s been extremely involved in Project 2025.

Most of his content on TikTok features him making a joke, doing a bit, or eating something outlandishly – as @waltermasterson has done on the left. Sometimes, he takes his bit too far though… with unexpected consequences. 

This week, following the Trump/Harris debate, McEntee published a video where he is eating what appears to be chicken fingers and asks: “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.”

The thing is McEntee left the video open for people to comment, duet, and stitch… which has inadvertently created a space for “the women” to identify themselves.

And they have, en masse: The post has over 22k comments, and so many of them are people sharing emotional stories of themselves or their loved ones who experienced traumatic and dangerous health situations because of the Dobbs decision.

For example, @geekynerdbitchcarmen shared her story about how she was denied care for a miscarriage for 19 days because of Idaho’s abortion restrictions. The video has amassed 6 million views and 1.3 million likes. @deidradarst also stitched the video and shared her horrifying experience. There are many, many more of these responses, which you can scroll through here.

The Harris campaign’s @kamalahq account stitched McEntee’s post with a video from another woman who VP Harris was referring to in her comment, which has 9.7 million views and counting. Comedian and prominent influencer @pearlmania500 also broke down how terrible (and dumb) this was for McEntee and received 615.3K views and 138.4K likes.

Date Right Stuff is learning the hard way that this bit only works when what you’re saying actually makes sense. And in this case – as in many others – his argument most certainly does not.

We’ll give the last word here to @waltermasterson. He was asked to break down McEntee’s whole vibe by @donlemonofficial and he delivered. 

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Trend alert: Trump’s wildest quotes go viral

As we’ve been tracking political TikTok content week over week, we’ve begun to identify a major trend in this election: users are clipping some of Donald Trump’s most bizarre statements and turning them into trending audio moments. 

Last week, we noted that it was happening with Trump’s unhinged “eating the cats and dogs” remarks. This week, there have been over 1,000 videos using a quote from Trump falsely claiming that schools are providing gender transition surgery to kids without their parents’ knowledge. The content, as a result, has been pretty incredible, with this video from a mom, @jujubutera4, gaining 6.9 million views and 1.1 million likes:

@jujubutera4Part 57 | I can’t even imagine this to be honest🤯 #trump2024🇺🇸 #american #schoolsurgery #trump #funnyvideos

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There are several other examples of moms trolling Trump over his comments that have received a ton of likes and views, including this one from @kayleekawaii and this one from @soccernat007.

With a combined tens of millions of views on the platform on videos like these, it is very likely that more Americans heard this audio of Trump’s bizarre anti-trans remarks from these humorous videos, rather than from Trump himself during the debate. 

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were around 29,500 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 865.3 million views. 

39% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 2% were neutral, and 59% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

While TikTok was overall positive for Team Harris this week, the top ten posts leaned negative.

Two critical posts from @teamtrump and one from @realdonaldtrump received millions of views. The more popular one, with 34.6 million views, was shared by Team Trump, featuring someone holding up a camera to the debate while VP Harris said we no longer have troops in an active war zone. The camera then turns to the folks watching the debate, who are revealed to be troops – apparently in an active war zone – and one asks “so where the f*ck are we right now?” 

@thecharliekirk has a top-performing video that was anti-Harris for the second week in a row as part of his campus tour, where he interacts with students and tries to school them. In this video, seen 13 million times, he “wins over” a student to vote for Trump, instead of Harris. 

Also notably, @dailymail had a video that received 10.4 million views of a Taylor Swift fan abandoning Swift over her Harris endorsement. In it, she’s burning all her Swift stuff and replacing it with End Wokeness gear.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 106,000 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1.8 billion views.

63% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 3.5% were neutral, and 34% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

This week’s top ten may have been tough for Team Harris, but it was equally tough for Team Trump.

@kamalahq had three very high-performing videos critical of Trump in the top ten this week. This video — with over 21 million views – was simply Donald Trump talking about Nicky Jam, saying “she’s so hot,” and then showing a photo of Nicky, who is actually a man. This one from @kamalahq, with almost 11 million views, hits Trump for being a narcissist. 

@dailymail made the top charts for both Trump and Harris TikTok content this week with this video of Harris mocking Trump for saying he had a “concept of a plan.”

And finally, this truly heartbreaking video from @chrismowrey – with over 9 million views – breaks down the unnecessary death of Amber Thurman due to complications from pregnancy that would have been preventable had Donald Trump not packed the Supreme Court with Justices who overturned Roe v Wade.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve, followed closely by the Presidential Debate.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The top post about the candidates’ “Fitness to Serve” was a breakdown of the debate from @thedailyshow where host Jordan Klepper slammed Trump for his complaining about the debate. The post has 16.2 million views and 1.9 million likes. The next most popular video in this category came from the @dailymail with that clip of Harris mocking Trump for having a concept of a plan – which has received 15.7 million views and then followed by @joepags with a harsh review of Harris’s first solo interview, which has 9.4 million views.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

NOTE: When we first launched this newsletter, we were only tracking the two campaign accounts: @bidenhq (which became @kamalahq) and @realdonaldtrump. Shortly after Harris became the nominee, her campaign rolled out @kamalaharris and we added it to the mix. In late July, the Trump campaign rolled out @teamtrump. But they only recently started using the account with much frequency. We’ll be including it in our reporting moving forward.

This week, Harris’ combined TikTok accounts gained 228.3 million new views and posted 36 videos.

It’s worth noting that @kamalahq is just about to pass a billion lifetime views – and by the time this hits your inbox, they might have done so already.

Their top post this week, with over 21 million views, was the one about Nicky Jam, followed by a video with Taylor Swift lyrics about never trusting a narcissist (with a picture of Trump on screen) that has 10.9 million views. 

Their third most popular post – with 8.8 million views and 1.6 million likes – was a very fun pro-Walz edit.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 44.8 million new views to their @realdonaldtrump account and posted four new videos. Starting next week, we’ll also be including @teamtrump in their new view count, but it’s worth noting that they posted to that account 40 times this week.

Of the posts shared by @realdonaldtrump, the biggest – with 6.5 million views – was Trump asking why Harris hasn’t already fixed everything.

That was followed up by two post-rally posts and then by a video of Trump thanking the officers who stopped the would-be shooter at Trump’s golf course.

Creator Spotlight: @maga

In case you haven’t been following, pro-Trump Super PAC MAGA Inc. is on Tiktok via the handle @maga. They have steadily amassed 542.8K followers and 11.1 million likes over the past few months.

Despite only launching the channel in May of this year, they’ve driven this massive growth by sharing clips and commentary supporting former President Trump and attacking VP Harris.

Their top post to date showed Harris at the debate inviting people to attend a Trump rally and then showed his rallies in a positive light. It has 13.2 million views and 2.4 million likes.

Other top videos from @maga include this bizarre video of JD Vance attacking Harris – but using a filter that slowly makes Vance, and the folks in the background, look like they have cartoon chins – and this “boom or doom” video that should give you some insight into how they’re approaching the platform

News & platform updates

• The TikTok ban is in court. Will the app still be around in 2025? The courts will decide.

• TikTok is rolling out an edit and repost option for videos.

• WaPo did a deep dive into the state of misinformation on the platform.

• Former President Barack Obama pushes voting on TikTok.

• More and more Americans are turning to TikTok for their news.

• Singer Billie Eilish posted an endorsement video for VP Harris, which made a big splash on TikTok.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

Tuesday night, Vice President Harris and former President Trump faced off in their first (and possibly last) presidential debate. We’ve been closely tracking content about both candidates all week, and the vibe on TikTok (as well as in Washington) is clear: Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump.

Harris’ many takedowns

On TikTok, there are countless clips of the moments Harris eviscerated Trump on a wide range of issues - and they have received tens of millions of views. @msnbc posted a clip of the VP going after Trump on abortion that has received over 18 million views and a clip of her “slamming” Trump for continuing to question the results of the 2020 election that has over 13 million views.

Similarly, @dailymail posted the moment Harris mocked Trump’s rallies, which has 11 million views, and @nbcnews posted a clip with Harris rebutting Trump’s claims about her infringing upon the rights of gun owners, which has over 31 million views. 

You’ll notice that most of these top-debate clips came from news accounts and not individual creators. Last week, Kyle and Lucy wrote about some of the most popular TikTok news brands in FWIW. 

Posts favorable to Trump?

For the sake of understanding the full online conversation, we also tried our hardest to track down the most positive debate content for Trump on TikTok. There wasn’t a lot. 

Right-wing former congressional candidate @realjrmajewski posted a very favorable take for Donald Trump, claiming calmly and confidently, that Trump had won the debate. But if you scroll down to the many, many comments on the video, it’s clear that his viewers most certainly do not agree. The top comment asks him “What planet he’s living on 🤣🤣🤣.”

Another semi-favorable post for Trump (we guess?) featured the former President in the Spin Room assuring the viewers still watching that he had won. @dailymail posted a clip of that exchange, which has received 3.2 million views, and @c4news also posted it, receiving 1 million views. But even those clips feature someone telling him – to his face – that he seemed rattled on the stage.

Comedy and conspiracies

While most TikTok users interacted with the debate by watching and reacting to straight news clips of the night’s biggest zingers from accounts like @msnbc, a few moments took off in wild and wonderful ways. 

Trump repeated a viral right-wing conspiracy that migrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. That line was widely mocked on TikTok, with users like @drinktastelli making some fun reaction content (2m views), and a whole lot of videos featuring scared animals listening to Trump’s comments. 

@luisamaria232323#humor #funnyvideos #trump #election2024 #debate #presidentialdebate #springfield

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Other users found ways to highlight the absurdity of Trump’s lie that Democrats support “post-birth abortion”, like this video from @ayekay20 (1.1m views) and this one from @jaidenomir (1m views). 

Here’s what’s clear to us: debate content dominated the week on TikTok, and most users on the platform were served content that was generally favorable to Harris and mocking of Donald Trump.

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were around 30,000 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 659.6 million views. 

23% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 6% were neutral, and 71% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

We should first note that these numbers were pulled yesterday (Wednesday), and many of these videos have accumulated millions and millions more views. 

Four of the top five posts listed in the above chart were discussed at the top of this newsletter, all of them debate content showing VP Harris dominating Donald Trump. 

Other popular posts mentioning Harris this week included this one from @msnbc of VP Harris walking over to shake former President Trump’s hand, this one from @dailymail explaining what to expect at the debate, and this one from @abcnews of Trump questioning why VP Harris hadn’t already accomplished her goals while she was in office.

All told, we think this hype post from @thedemocrats, which was shared in the lead-up to the debate, captured the overall tone of both the night and the content that followed to the tune of 7 million views.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 50,900 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 852.5 million views.

72% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 4% were neutral, and 24% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

The most-viewed post mentioning Trump this week came from @thecharliekirkshow, and it was a massive one, with millions and millions of views and likes. It’s a college student speaking to Kirk about why he supports Trump. The TL;DR of it is that Trump is better for the economy and his family is struggling under the Biden administration, but half of the short video is him clarifying that as a Christian, he’s uncomfortable with Trump’s “personal drama.” 

Other than that, TikTok was an absolute bloodbath for Trump. The next six most popular clips, with tens of millions of views, were just brutal for the former President.

@msnbc had three viral videos that were negative about Trump: one where VP Harris says he was fired by 81 million people, one where she hits him on abortion, and one rounding up all the times he had to be fact-checked during the debate. @dailymail also had several viral videos, including one about Trump spreading conspiracy theories and one where Harris took a swing at his rallies.

The only positive debate clip for Trump to make this week’s top ten came from @cnn and it was him claiming that Harris hates both Israel as well as the Arab population. 

Measuring the vibe shift

Each week, we’ve been using Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. 

In order to illustrate how these vibes have played out, we’ve charted what percentage of the top-posts each week are positive for each candidate. Take a look:

As you can see, before Harris became the Democratic nominee, the vibes for Trump were generally positive, whereas Biden was in rough shape. That trend has now reversed, and each week, a majority of posts mentioning Harris are positive or favorable to her candidacy. 

We should note that while this data may be imprecise and certainly has a margin for error, it underscores a very real trend: that the vibes have shifted on TikTok in Harris’ favor and against Donald Trump. 

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was the Presidential Debate.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The Presidential Debate, despite taking place right at the end of our weekly tracking period, still stole the show this week – and, of course, we’ve already reported on it at length above.

Tragically, another massive political story this week was the school shooting in Georgia. There were some very viral clips shared of students talking about their school. They are, as you would imagine, completely heartbreaking. @cbsnews posted a clip of students remembering their teacher who was killed. @dailymail posted a video of a student saying she was “not surprised” by the gunman’s actions, and @cnn posted a video asking what students experienced during the shooting.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’ combined TikTok accounts gained 86.5 million new views and posted 46 videos.

Of the 46 videos they posted in the past 7 days, 20 of them reached at least a million views. Their top post of the week was a photo carousel of photos of Donald Trump looking haggard with different filters.

Another high-performing post was a clip of former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley saying “Mark my words, we will see a President Kamala Harris” followed by Harris saying she approved this message. It got 4.1 million views and 667.7K likes. 

Over on Team Trump, they gained 22.9 million new views and posted just two new videos. 

One was from a rally he held in Mosinee, WI talking about RFK Jr helping to Make America Healthy Again, which received 3.1 million views and 421K likes. The other was posted with rapper and singer @anuel checking out “a serious looking vehicle” (9.4 million views and 959.8K views). 

Creator Spotlight: @itslinklauren

Link Lauren TikToked his way onto RFK Jr.’s campaign team. But now that RFK has suspended his campaign, Link Lauren is still going strong with 588.3K followers and 25.6 million likes.

Link is given a lot of credit for Kennedy building a significant following on the platform, especially with a younger audience. While he does occasionally post about Donald Trump, he spends a lot more of his time tearing down Kamala Harris (who he refers to as Kamalamity).

Lauren started out on TikTok by covering pop culture, particularly the British royal family. And if you look at his most popular posts, that’s actually what they’re mostly about (not RFK Jr.). But he seems to have now turned his attention to American politics and leaned all the way in.

News & platform updates

• TikTok is reportedly rolling out a new Profile Search option. We don’t have it yet, but we’re excited to get it! It will apparently let you search profiles by keywords and hashtags.

• They’re also apparently rolling out Notes. Because if Instagram has it, they must have it too, right?

• Busy week at TikTok! They’re also rolling out a new tool to help train your personal algorithm, letting them know if you like or don’t like a particular piece of content.

• Can you be a paid influencer and a Senate candidate? The FEC says yes!

• Fast Company dives into Donald Trump’s flip flop on banning TikTok.

• Don’t yell fire in a crowded theater and don’t make school shooting threats on TikTok (or anywhere else for that matter!).

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.

Kamala Harris’s candidacy is unprecedented in modern times. She didn’t go through a primary but rather emerged as the candidate just weeks before accepting her party’s nomination. Coming out of the DNC, she had been criticized for not prioritizing mainstream media interviews, and last week she gave the press corps what they wanted via a sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash. 

Clips of the interview were viewed quite a bit on TikTok. Harris’ deft response to a question about Trump’s racist criticism of her was shared by @CNN and @dailymail and received millions of views. Other popular moments from the interview were a question about President Biden’s phone call to Harris about dropping out and a CNN analyst attacking Harris for “drastically changing her views.”

Some popular content creators on TikTok were critical of the interview, however. @underthedesknews reported on the interview to their more than 3 million followers, which included summing up the interview quickly and making it clear how disappointing it was. They then shared footage of a roundtable discussion that VP Harris hosted back in February which covered reproductive freedom, IVF, and maternal mortality, saying “Since we didn’t get [anything substantive] from CNN tonight, hopefully, I can give it to you here.” The video currently has 250,000+ views and 43.4K likes.

Another Harris-related political trend caught our eye this week: You may have heard that Kamala Harris is proposing to tax unrealized capital gains. The right-wing outrage machine has become so angry about this, that it’s become a meme on Twitter.

But if the policy rollout is a bit confusing to you, the headlines will unfortunately not be much help. But don’t worry – TikTok creator @alexisanddean has you covered. This TikTok account is run by Alexis who “asks her husband [Dean] questions.” The duo has almost 1 million followers and 8 million likes. In this specific video, Alexis asks Dean if we should be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris.

@alexisanddeanShould we be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris? #capitalgains #capitalgainstax #kamalaharris #harris2024 #tax #taxes #capitalgains #uspolitics #politics #trump #trump2024 #taxcuts #taxpolicy #economics #useconomy #ustaxes #taxation #econ101 #fintok #finance #finance101 #financialfreedom #financialliteracy #financialeducation #financetiktok #invest #investing #investor

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Dean helpfully explains that this proposed change only applies to folks worth at least $100 million dollars. So for most of us, this is not something to stress about. The video has 3 million views and 250,000+ likes.

Pew recently released a new report sharing that around half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the platform to keep up with politics and news. And looking at content like this raises the key question: why should people tune into CNN to watch Kamala Harris be asked (not even for the first time) to respond to Donald Trump questioning her race when they can tune in to accounts like Under the Desk News to hear VP Harris talk about actual policy?

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 21,900 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 383.2 million views. 

39% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 4% were neutral, and 57% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

On the other hand, two of the top posts were clips from @cnn taken from her recent interview with them, and both showed the VP in a positive light. 

Finally, this top video, also from @dailymail, reminded us that Tim Walz is very good at retail politics, as he spun a hit against him for having a defined benefit pension plan into a chance to express that he wants every American to have a defined benefit pension plan. 

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 36,100 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 601 million views.

69% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 3% were neutral, and 28% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

This clip from @thegoodliars, which was viewed over 11 million times and had over 1 million likes, showed man-on-the-street style interviews with Trump fans. Spoilers: It did not go well for the Trump fans.

Meanwhile, another clip from @msnbc received over 9 million views and almost 600K likes and shows Donald Trump responding to the controversy that he used Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop. In the clip, he questions whether he was set up by some of the Gold Star families he was filming with. Also on the topic of Trump’s struggles to answer to the public in any real way: @cbsnews and @nbcnews both had high-performing videos of him talking about IVF, while @dailymail showed him struggling with an abortion answer.

Finally, @kamalahq shared what might be the best ad of the entire cycle so far. This one is a must-see.

@kamalahqyikes

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On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The DNC briefly took center stage last week, but Fitness to Serve (or lack thereof) roared back to the top spot this week, significantly outpacing every other one of our tracked topics. However, there is a lot of overlap between the top posts in the category with content we’ve already shared above. So this week, we’re picking a different top category to get a peek at what’s happening.

We chose SCOTUS – content about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is EVERYWHERE, in large part due to her book tour. Here she is on @colbertlateshow making the ultimate ruling on whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Here’s a clip of her on @cbsmornings talking about her scene pairing with Matt Damon and another from that same interview talking about her experience testifying during her confirmation hearings.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’ combined TikTok accounts gained 66.5 million new views and posted 32 videos.

Their top post of the week was that banger ad about bodily autonomy and choice we shared above. It’s got 3.5 million views and 586.6K likes. If you didn’t watch it above, watch it now. It’s really good content.

Their second top post was of Tim Walz getting really excited about a sweet treat with NC Governor Roy Cooper, which received 3 million views and 485.8K likes.

Over on Team Trump, they gained 18.5 million new views and posted just one new video.

It’s a direct-to-camera video clip of Trump pushing early voting in NC. To date, it has 195.6K views and 32.3K likes. 

Creator Spotlight: @votesamwiles

There are a lot of folks on TikTok “doing” JD Vance these days. (We shared several in last week’s issue.) But Sam here (@votesamwiles) is doing it really well. 

Prior to August 2024, Sam had posted to this account only three times — two were weird gags and one was a clip of him doing standup.

But since August 7th, he’s been pumping out the content. And just about all of it is him doing a JD Vance impression. Bearded and in eyeliner, he’s looking at the camera and talking about his policy agenda.

Here’s a video where he shares that he wants to bring back McCarthyism, outlaw thongs, and burn books and another one where he responds to liberals calling him weird. Here’s one where he warns that if Kamala Harris wins, it’ll become curtains for guys doing guy stuff. 

Three weeks into the bit, he’s already at 41.7K followers and has 1.5 million likes.

News & platform updates

• The influencers are influencing… but at what cost?

• Team Harris is crushing it on social media in case you couldn’t already tell.

• Can internet hype lead to actual votes? Democrats are trying to make it happen.

• As mentioned above, half of TikTok users under 30 use the app to keep up with politics. That’s a mind-boggling number – and it highlights how much campaigns and causes must have a strategy to reach these audiences.

• Teens are literally making thousands of dollars by debating Trump vs. Harris on TikTok.

• How do you measure success for an influencer campaign? Well, it’s safe to say that the 400 million impressions amassed by the content creators who attended the DNC count as a success, right?

• Speaking of, Taylor Lorenz had a great essay on the role of those content creators at the DNC.

• TikTok is expanding its “How to Vote” resources heading into the election, with a focus on how elections work and media literacy. 

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

This week, the political vibes on TikTok were all about contrasts - primarily between vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz. 

Walz, as previously reported, joined the platform less than two weeks ago, already accumulating 1.3 million followers and 3.2 million likes. Walz sat down for a brief interview with @subwaytakes - a popular account that - you guessed it - interviews celebs on the subway. While it appears they’re not actually on the NYC subway, Walz’s @subwaytakes interview avoided going off the rails - with the Minnesota Governor going deep on the need to clean gutters and how to make the perfect cheeseburger. He even joined the host in singing the Menards theme song:

@subwaytakesEpisode 172: The most neglected part of home ownership is THE GUTTERS 🏡 feat #TimWalz 🚋🚋🚋🚋🚋 Hosted by @KAREEM RAHMA Shot by @Anthony DiMieri @Willem Holzer Edited by Anthony DiMieri Associate producer @Ramy #podcast #subway #hottakes #subwaytakes #interview #nyc #newyorkcity #timwalz #homeimprovement #diy #homes #minnesota

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As of yesterday afternoon, the interview had only received around 100,000 views on the @subwaytakes account, but it was reshared by progressive news account @couriernewsroom and racked up over 1.5 million views. Off TikTok, the cheeky interview was written about dozens of times in the mainstream political press. 

That was just one of several viral moments featuring “TimTok” this week. His son Gus’s emotional moment at the DNC was criticized by right-wingers trying to make it a show of weakness…and it blew up in their faces. TikTok is awash with content of people showing their love to the Walz family. 

Here’s an emotional montage from @dailymail with 7.7 million views and over 900K likes. Here’s @abc7la declaring Gus’s reaction “one of the most emotional moments of the night” to 8.1 million viewers with 892K likes. Here’s @dailymail showing a Michelle Obama tweet defending Gus to 1.5 million views and over 50K likes. The list goes on and on.

And then we have JD Vance, who just can’t seem to catch a break on TikTok. 

Despite joining the platform on August 1st, he only has 526K followers and 717K likes. While the content he’s sharing isn’t exactly going viral, mostly negative user-generated content about him is everywhere.

He had a viral moment (in the worst possible way) this week when he went into a donut shop and interacted with the people working there like it was the first time he’d ever interacted with other humans. 

Here’s @samcahntent roasting his inability to have a normal conversation (4 million views and 458K likes). Here’s @henrikontheweb doing the same (3 million views and 326K likes). And @thegingerbeerd getting in on the fun (1.3 million views and 105K likes). 

Those were three of the top five posts mentioning JD on TikTok this week! In fact, of the top ten most popular TikTok posts about Vance this week, six were about this terrible campaign interaction. Two more were about his “childless cat ladies” comment (see those here and here), and the final two were both clips of Secretary Pete Buttigieg doing his Secretary Pete thing and roasting Vance (see those here and here). 

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 26,100 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 583 million views. 

~26% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 5% were neutral, and 68% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

The top post mentioning Harris – by far – was from @msnbc of the clip of Kerry Washington with VP Harris’s nieces teaching Trump how to pronounce their Auntie’s name. This video has received 20.2 million views and 2.2 million likes. @cbsnews also got 4.8 million views and 283.7K likes sharing the same clip.

This video from @yapybara contrasting the different vibes at the RNC convention and the DNC convention got 7.3 million views and 1 million likes.

Eight of the top ten posts about Harris were unquestionably positive. One was neutral, which was a clip of Gov. Tim Walz pulling Gus’s arm on stage at the DNC. This moment was quite clearly Tim trying to help his son not walk into a teleprompter but has been widely shared by those on the right to make Walz seem like he’s an abusive dad. 

And one was negative: a video from @thetrumpshow pushing the GOP narrative that Harris failed to appear to honor veterans at an Arlington ceremony (where it seems Trump’s staff appeared to overshadow the event by getting into a fight with the cemetery staff).

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 50,900 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 881 million views.

~63% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 4% were neutral, and 34% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

The most-viewed video mentioning Trump was also that massive @msnbc post of Kerry Washington we mentioned above. 

Notably, the next most popular post, with 15 million views and 1.1 million likes, was a @cbsnews clip of RFK Jr formally endorsing Trump. 

It’s worth noting that there were only three positive videos about Trump in the top ten this week. In general terms, it was another not-so-great week for Team Trump on TikTok.

Here’s a clip from @msnbc of Rachel Maddow unpacking a behind-the-scenes view of Kari Lake being asked, in ever-increasing terms, to please vacate the stage.

Here’s a clip from @cnn of VP Harris calling Trump an unserious man but warning that “the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.” It got 3.4 million views and 161.3K likes.

…and this post from @thegoodliars with 3.3 million views and 262.5K likes reshared an old video featuring a woman who believes that Trump is currently President. But so is Obama. But also, neither are, but kinda both. But… yeah. It’s worth a watch.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was the Democratic National Convention.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

As we wrote last Thursday, the DNC Convention in Chicago really has driven the conversation about politics on TikTok in the past week. When it came to DNC trending content, it was just good vibe after good vibe.

Kerry Washington and the nieces were the top hit. There were several other posts comparing the energy of the DNC with that of the RNC. We’ve already shared a few of those above. Here’s a good one from @msnbc specifically focused on the musical differences. 

Here’s an “unpatriotic white Australian watching the DNC convention” and getting into the vibe with 818.2K views and 194.5K likes. And here’s a post from @msnbc of a Republican strategist sharing that what really makes Trump angry is how many celebrities were involved in the DNC. (1.6 million views and 116.1K likes).

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’s combined accounts gained 98.2 million new views and posted 39 videos. 

Their top performing post is just an AI image of dolphins jumping out of the water, with the text “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 is a threat to our democracy.” It has 7.2 million views. At the risk of repeating ourselves, if you’re not experimenting with images/carousels on TikTok, you’re missing out. 

As you can imagine, most of the campaign’s other top posts were footage from the DNC. 

Over on Team Trump, they gained 25.9 million new views and posted two new videos. 

One was of Tulsi Gabbard endorsing him, and the other was of his extremely controversial photo op at Arlington National Cemetary that we mentioned above.

Creator Spotlight: @terrencekwilliams

Terrance is a Black MAGA conservative actor and comedian who goes after Democrats to his 428K TikTok followers. 

He is a big fan of Donald Trump, and he is most certainly not a fan of Kamala Harris. Here’s an example of typical content, in which he calls Harris a Phonyyy for the way she speaks to Black crowds. He often shares kind of bizarre clips asking if she’s drunk. Here’s one. Here’s another.

He also does things like this: An emotional video where he sobbingly tells a story about being abused… by Kamala Harris. He’s at least a full minute into the video before it becomes clear that it’s satire. He holds the bit until the end.

News & platform updates

• A TikTok craze in Iceland has led to a nationwide cucumber shortage.

• A TikTok trend leads to a trademark battle. This is the opposite of demure. 

• A new trend has folks focused on underconsumption.

• A 10-year-old died after taking part in a viral “blackout challenge.” Is TikTok to blame? That’s up to the courts.

• If your For You page is flooded with Korean Cheerleaders, you are not alone.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

While tonight is the final night of the DNC Convention in Chicago, users on TikTok didn’t wait until the end of convention week to get that sweet content up and rolling. On the viral social media app, clips of the DNC’s many speakers are abundant. 

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Here’s Obama saying “Don’t boo. Vote” to over 3.4 million viewers. Here’s former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham declaring that she loves her country more than her party to 1.9 million viewers. And here’s Rep. Jasmine Crockett asking 1.4 million viewers on TikTok to compare Kamala Harris’s resume against Donald Trump’s rap sheet.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg even used the DNC to launch his own TikTok account, gaining over half a million followers in a matter of hours. 

Two of the top ten posts, however, about the DNC were about Lil Jon’s surprise appearance (and cameo performance) during Georgia’s turn in the roll call. This one from @dailymail has 2.1 million views and 151.1K likes and this one from @msnbc has 1 million views and 137.1K likes. If you’re looking for some interesting hot takes and analyses from some non-politicos on Lil Jon’s appearance, here’s one. Here’s another. And one more.

And here’s a fun one showing the different energies between the Republican Party’s Roll Call at the RNC last month, and the Democratic Par-tay Roll Call on Tuesday.

@lbkilgorePretty sure we could hear #liljon over the par-taaaayyyy #dnc #dncrollcall #dnc2024 #rncvsdnc #byetrump #kamala

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According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were at least 1,500 posts on TikTok about the DNC that received over 180 million views. Our suspicion is that those numbers are a major undercount. Besides, we expect to see a lot more content about the DNC continue to roll into next week. If you somehow missed it on TV or in person, TikTok certainly had you covered.

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@TimWalz quickly overcomes @JD

As we’ve written before, JD Vance joined TikTok on August 1st. He made the shockingly poor decision to have his first video be literally overflowing with couches. 👀 To date, there are just four videos posted to the account.

Over on the Left, Tim Walz joined TikTok this past Friday, sharing a video with his dog Scout at the dog park announcing his entry to “TimTok.” To date, there are seven videos posted to the account.

Looking at the numbers, @JD now has 409,900 followers and 572,200 likes, while @TimWalz has already blown past his “weird” rival, racking up 1.1 million followers and 2.1 million likes.

Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 32,900 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 434.2 million views. 

24% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative and 74% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

The most-viewed post on TikTok mentioning Harris this week was from @couriernewsroom, showing a man on the street style video asking folks at Home Depot and Lowes  “Trump or Kamala?” It has received over 27 million views. It’s notable because it's basically a mashup of the good parts of a bunch of anti-Harris videos from user @langstone680. 

@couriernewsroom👀 (via langstone680)

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On the other side of the aisle, @donaldtrumpjr also received a bunch of views on at least one Kamala-related video. Don Jr recreated a joke Team Harris used a while back, showing Harris saying something negative, and then tacking on a Trump disclaimer, declaring he “approved this message.”

But other than that hit, all the other top posts about Harris this week were neutral or positive.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 41,600 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 703.9 million views.

63% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative and 36% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

This clip from @dailymail made both lists (5.2 million views and 408.8K likes). We’re counting this as neutral for both because it’s hard to determine the intention of the poster. But in our humble opinion, this is a hit against Trump and a big plus for Harris. It’s just a clip of Trump complaining that “Everyone gets health care if Harris is elected.” Good or bad? You decide!

This other @dailymail clip of Trump making fun of Harris’ laugh also threw us for a loop. He comes across quite poorly, but as they say, sentiment analysis is in the eye of the beholder.

Those were the only clips in the top ten this week about Donald Trump that weren’t clearly, and brutally, negative. 

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

This week, four of the top five posts were pro-Kamala posts, and only one was a hit against Trump’s fitness to serve. 

Those included the new Kamala ad at the DNC (with 4.3 million views and 921K likes), Joe Biden getting tons of love during the event (with 4.6 million views and 478.6K likes), and, as we mentioned above, President Obama bringing out an old classic, telling folks Don’t boo, vote (with 3.3 million views and 290.8K likes). 

Another was @thedailyshow skewering Trump for oddly using Tic Tacs to explain inflation (with 3.8 million views and 416.1K likes).

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’s combined accounts gained 61 million new views and posted 29 videos. 

The top-performing @KamalaHQ post of the week was a new ad shown at the DNC. This photo slideshow of JD Vance posing for a photo with a Wall Street Journal headline talking about inflation being down also did some huge numbers. 

And the top post from @kamalaharris was of VP Harris showing NC Governor Roy Cooper which pickles she had picked up for Doug. 

Over on Team Trump, they gained 60.3 million new views and posted four new videos. All four videos ran up solid numbers, ranging from 1.6 million views all the way to 19.8 million views. One was an edited bit making the election “Too Big To Rig.” All the rest were just him speaking directly to the camera. 

The video with 1.6 million views was posted quite recently and we expect those numbers to go up. Excluding that one, of the 12 videos he’s posted in total, his posts have an average view count north of 53 million. It’s kind of surprising how rarely they post to the account given their massive reach. 

Though if the last two weeks are an indication, we expect to see more from Team Trump on TikTok in the weeks to come.

Creator Spotlight: @yourbluechannelofficial

Their handle is @yourbluechannelofficial, but their name on TikTok is Latinos for Harris 🤝🥥🌴.

Run by Wilmer Castro, this account is focused on promoting a message of: “Dem, Anti-Trump, Pro-Choice, Feminist, LGBTQ ally, Woke, Gun Control+”

They do so with passion and joy.

Latinos For Harris uses trending sounds, funny bits, costume changes and more to attack Donald Trump, lift up Kamala Harris and generally push progressive values on the platform.

Here’s a comedic post of them hitting “actors who support Trump” with a shoe, a la whack-a-mole. Here is Castro “calling every Republican he knows so he can laugh at how Biden got Mexico to pay for the wall and Trump couldn’t.” Here he is celebrating that Fox admitted that they were lying about the election being stolen after the Dominion settlement came to light.

There are lots of folks reporting on these types of stories, but few do it with the kind of glee that he brings to the table. And it’s working for him. Despite getting his initial account banned in early 2023, Castro has already rebuilt a following of almost 100,000 followers and racked up over 2.6 million likes.

News & platform updates

• For years, other social media platforms were producing copycat features and following TikTok’s lead. But recently, we’ve seen TikTok expanding into some of Instagram’s territory. First, it was photo carousels (which, as we flagged last week, can be really solid performers!). Now, they’re coming for the group chat.

• Feel free to hold your phone upright! The DNC has been streaming vertically this year.

• Feel like the internet is lacking in centers of gravity these days? It’s not just you.

• Don’t be creepy, in real life… or on the internet!

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

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Third-party spoiler candidate RFK Jr., despite lacking a path to the White House, sure seems to understand how to get earned media - for better or for worse. One week, it’s brain worms and another, it’s him admitting sexual assault. Most recently, it was for illegally dumping a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park and staging it to look like a bike accident. 

People who follow the world of digital politics know that despite his many personal and political flaws, Kennedy’s campaign is extremely adept at using TikTok. 

With over 1.7 million followers, they possess one of the largest audiences of any political campaign on the platform (with the exception of Teams Harris and Trump) and regularly push out over a dozen videos a week, racking up views in the millions. 

But as it turns out, the only person really talking about RFK Jr. on TikTok is... RFK Jr. 

According to social analytics platform Zelf, on any given week, there are only a few hundred new posts on TikTok mentioning RFK Jr., compared to *tens of thousands* for his presidential campaign rivals Harris and Trump. In terms of views on those posts, Harris and Trump-related content typically receive over 1 billion views in a 7-day period. Videos mentioning Kennedy, in aggregate, typically are seen just a few million times. 

…and if you were wondering, some of @TeamKennedy2024’s biggest viral hits include RFK Jr’s own State of the Union address, a video of him doing a workout and “getting pumped,” and, of course, the candidate with his two pet ravens. He’s also received a “surprise endorsement” from Russell Brand (lol), responded to Harris “ripping” 18-24 year olds, and spoke about unity following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

If you really want to get a sense of the Kennedy campaign’s approach to TikTok, watch that Russell Brand endorsement video in full. It starts weird (with Brand trying but failing to get people to support RFK), works its way into a silly gag about globalists and the CIA, and ends with a joke about Kennedy eating dogs (which Kennedy has since denied and said he actually ate a goat). 

The whole thing is a wild ride with a lot of unexpected turns.

… Anyway, the fact that there may be less grassroots enthusiasm and interest in Kennedy on TikTok than previously thought has implications for how both campaigns should see the candidate. Overestimating Kennedy’s support on the platform could drive either campaign to address the gadfly candidate head-on, which has seemingly been Team Kennedy’s goal all along.  

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TikTok search becomes less transparent

This week, TikTok instituted a major change to how users, researchers, and journalists can search for top performing political content on the platform. For most words, hashtags, or phrases, anyone can use Tiktok’s search bar to find, and then filter videos by most-liked within a certain time period. That allows us to quickly identify which videos are going viral within the past week, and manually cross check our data that we’re receiving from our social analytics platform, Zelf.

However, this week, TikTok disabled the “filter” functionality on searches related to the presidential candidates. If you search for “Trump” or “Kamala” now, you will no longer be able to filter for the most impactful videos, and instead you’re served a random grouping of videos the platform has curated. That’s a major step backward for transparency - especially with less than 3 months to go to Election Day.

For our part, we’ll continue using workarounds to manually check our data - it’s just going to be much harder, and you may notice we miss a few pieces of content in the following “most-viewed” charts. Send us a reply to this email if you see a viral post that you think we should have included - it will help us improve our tracking in the future. 🙏

Top posts: Kamala Harris

This week, we’re having some data maintenance issues and don’t have total platform post data to include. We’ll be back with those numbers next week. 

According to social analytics platform Zelf, 19% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative and 81% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

The most-viewed Harris post on TikTok this week was from @nowthisimpact, talking about her favorite curse word. It’s a re-publishing of an old video interview clip from 2020 with then-Senator Kamala Harris. It’s been viewed over 26 million times in the past few days. 

This video from @aka_virgil1 shows two yard signs, one that reads “I’m Voting For The Felon” next to one that says “Back The Badge” that also has a little ditty in the background just repeating the refrain “Republicans are fucking dumb,” got 5.5 million views and 1.1 million likes.  

…and this @msnbc video of Governor Walz talking about his own family’s experience with IVF received 4.5 million views and almost half a million likes: “I’m not crying, you’re crying.”

Top posts: Donald Trump

87% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative and 13% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

This is the second week in a row where most top videos about Trump on TikTok were pretty brutal

Here’s @13greeneggsandham sharing that Trump had endorsed Harris by stating that a criminal can’t be President (1.6 million views and 408,300 likes), @kingkashed counting the seconds while Trump froze on live TV (2 million views and 53,000 likes) and @ kingpanda.bb with… well, let’s just say you should watch this one in full.

@kingpanda.bbBREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump receives full throated endorsement from Elon Musk. #maga #donaldtrump #elonmusk #fullthroated #president #usa #voteblue #kamalaharris #kamala #whenwefightwewin

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There weren’t a lot of positive videos for Trump in the top spots this week. Here’s a behind-the-scenes one of Trump meeting with a young Medal Of Honor Portrait Artist, and both assuming that if someone has a Medal Of Honor, they’re “in pretty rough shape” and asking if she can make him (Trump) look as good as the soldier in the painting. It was shared by @tophertownmusic and it has 1.5 million views and 206,700 likes.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve/Age.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

All of the top spots in this issue category were hits against Trump’s fitness to serve this week.

The @davidpakmanshow covered Trump’s “glitch” (7.8 million views and almost a million likes), @dailymail showed him being confused about Harris’s last name (9.6 million views and over half a million likes), @thedailyshow decimated him for not remembering which Black politician he was almost in a helicopter crash with (4.1 million views and 555,200 likes) and @dailymail showed him lose his temper when asked about the size of Harris’s crowd (3.8 million views and 313,800 likes).

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’s combined accounts gained 142 million new views and posted 19 videos. Interestingly, the campaign only posted 3 times to @KamalaHarris, but @KamalaHQ posted 16 times.

The top-performing Harris campaign post of the week was Harris signing a book for a little girl while Governor Walz serves as her very excited wingman. 

Remember that photo slideshow we shared last week that started with a photo of Donald Trump looking awkward at a laptop, and then showed his weird searches? Last week, that video was at 6.1 million views and 1.1 million likes. Today, it’s at 9.2 million views and 1.5 million likes. Don’t sleep on photo carousels on TikTok y’all!

Over on Team Trump, they gained 31.9 million new views this past week while posting no new videos. But here’s something of note about their content to date: they’ve only posted to the platform nine times total, and two of those videos have since been muted by TikTok. Donald Trump is notorious for playing music without permission at his rallies. Looks like he can’t do so on TikTok with impunity.

Creator Spotlight: @michaelsolakiewicz

If you want behind-the-scenes footage of the Trump campaign, Michael Solakiewicz has you covered.

Although it's unclear to us if he’s actually affiliated with the Trump campaign, his content sure makes it seem like he has special access. He regularly shares day-in-the-life content about Trump through his growing TikTok account.

He posts videos of former President Trump on the golf course, hanging with family, heading to rallies, and even talking to Elon Musk during his big Twitter Space event this week. Many of these videos are taken from the personal accounts of key Trump staffers, who accompany the former President pretty much everywhere. 

Interestingly, Solakiewicz shares a lot of the same clips on Twitter to very little engagement. But folks on TikTok sure are into what he is sharing: He’s gained over 400,000 followers and 10 million likes to date on the platform.

News & platform updates

• This is the week everyone on TikTok learned what the word “demure” means. Including this Jon Tester stan account. 

• According to the Washington Post, the Trump campaign is using TikTok to grow a less political and more entertainment-focused following, despite previously trying to ban the platform.

• Political misinformation is coming from outside the house, and it’s all over TikTok.

• Trump’s not just down in the polls, he’s also struggling in his once safe space - social media. And despite his best efforts, even Elon Musk isn’t helping.

• It’s not just you – the vibe really is shifting. Influencers are flocking to be involved with the Harris campaign.

• TikTok Shops were supposed to rival Amazon. But now, instead of competing, the two massive platforms are partnering.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

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This week, the hate turned into joy as Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. Initial content about Walz has been and continues to be overwhelmingly positive on TikTok, mostly focused on introducing his record and biography to a wide audience. 

One of the most viral pieces of content about Walz came from the @dailymail, which highlighted a video of the Midwestern Dad signing into law a free school lunch policy for MN children. It’s received around 3 million views so far.

@dailymailMinnesota Governor Tim Walz has officially been announced as the Democratic VP candidate. Back in 2023, he signed a bill making breakfasts and lunches free for Minnesota students. #timwalz #minnesota #kamala #kamalaharris #vicepresident #president #election #politics #usa #vote2024 #democrat

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Liberal news account @couriernewsroom also had some huge Walz posts this week. Their compilation of “4 times Tim Walz went on TV and just made sense” has 2 million views, while this GOTV video of him teaching America how to change a headlight harness on a 2014 Ford Edge similarly received over 1.3 million views. Another video (shared by many accounts) of Walz and daughter Hope riding a roller coaster also was shared far and wide in the days after his announcement. 

There were also plenty of clips rolling around the Tok from his big rally with VP Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. This video of Walz introducing himself from @cspanofficial earned 1.8 million views and 288k likes. And this one from @meidastouch of him brutally dismantling JD Vance (along with the aforementioned pretty funny couch joke!) was viewed 2.1 million times and was liked 297.1K times.

This “Midwesterner’s Guide to Tim Walz” from @world.shaker took the Chuck Norris concept and reworked it accordingly. He spliced in some real facts about Walz, while also deadpanning a bunch of jokes about what it means to be an endearing Midwest Dad (“he’ll slip gas money in your pocket and whisper ‘don’t tell mom’.”). It’s been viewed 1.3 million times and has 241.1K likes.

Here’s a post from @ndsafterdark about then-teacher and football Coach Walz helping to start a Gay/Straight Alliance Group to combat bullying toward his high school’s LGBT students. It has 1.3 million views and 238.6K likes. 

Finally, we’ll let Minnesota resident Sheletta sum this up for us in this fun person-on-the-street style video from @ohsorandom1978.

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 85,500 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1.4 billion views. 

17% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 1% were neutral, and 82% were positive. These were the top ten most-viewed:

By our estimates, the most-viewed Harris post on TikTok this week was this @cnn clip of VP Harris herself calling out Donald Trump for his “divisiveness and disrespect.”

The @dailymail had two popular posts, one about the US/Russia prisoner swap and one sharing the phone call of VP Harris inviting Governor Walz to be her running mate.

We also saw a few big negative hits against Harris. @tulsigabbard was big-time mad that MSNBC appeared to share an edited video making it sound like Joe Rogan supported Harris when, according to Gabbard, he was not referring to Harris, but to Gabbard. And @cantcancelrobsmith was one of many creators to make fun of the way Harris speaks.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 76,000 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1.3 billion views. 

89% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 3% were neutral, and 8% were positive. These were the top ten most-viewed:

TikTok used to be MAGA-friendly territory. No more. The vast majority of posts mentioning Trump on the platform this week were brutal for the former President.

There were numerous videos about his racist comments about Kamala Harris. Here’s one from @thedailyshow and one from @cnn. Here’s a post about him beating up on Brian Kemp, Georgia’s kind of popular Republican Governor. And here’s a post from @celebs.against.trump where Pete Davidson pokes fun at Trump for not knowing how to read.

The top post showing some love to Donald Trump this week was shared by @dailymail and it was just Trump and streamer Adin Ross sitting in a Trump-personalized Cybertruck, jamming out to… we kid you not… All The Leaves Are Brown by The Mamas & The Papas. 🤷‍♂️

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Fitness to Serve/Age.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

“She doesn’t have that best wordin’ with sentences, even against Biden...does.” Those were the enlightened words of a Trump supporter in this viral, mocking man-on-the-street video from Democratic influencer @lukebeasleyofficial. And another video on the topic of Harris’ fitness for office includes this fake commercial about a “Kia Kamala” that “goes from zero to nominee with zero votes.” It was shared by user @ilypierce and received some big view numbers. 

However, the vast majority of posts in the “fitness-to-serve” category were squarely focused on Trump. Here’s one from @waltermasterson about Trump being a convicted felon. Here’s another from @couriernewsroom featuring a group of Arizona Republicans formally endorsing Harris, “the adult in the room.” 

The next most popular topics this week were Women’s Rights / Abortion and Election Integrity.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

This week, Harris’s combined accounts gained 197 million new views and posted 32 videos. Their top-performing post of the week was this one, featuring Harris challenging Trump to a debate: “You got something to say, say it to my face.”

They also racked up some huge numbers with this photo slideshow that started with a photo of Donald Trump looking awkward at a laptop, captioned “Trump’s frequently asked questions,” and then showed him searching for things like “how to back out of a debate,” “do people really not like JD?” and “am i weird quiz.” This video currently has 6.1 million views and 1.1 million likes.

Over on Team Trump, they gained 48.8 million new views this past week and posted two videos. The first was Trump calling local Atlanta artist Artlanta up on stage to show off a painting of… Donald Trump. The second was Trump dancing (if that’s what you can call it) alongside @adinross to YMCA. It has 26.6 million views and 3.3 million likes.

Creator Spotlight: @casadimusic

CasaDi didn’t start out creating political content. In fact, their work wasn’t really political at all… until recently. But ever since Joe Biden stepped aside for Kamala Harris, these two producers have been making political bangers, using speeches from Harris, Walz… and one you’ve definitely seen, the clip of JD Vance saying he’s a “never Trump” guy (link below, we got you).”

They’ve done 8 political remix videos just over the last two weeks, some racking up tens or hundreds of thousands of views, some reaching millions.

In addition to the “Never Trump Guy” heater, here’s Tim Walz remixed talking about how “these are weird people.” Here’s one about Trump Mad. And here’s one that went proper viral (3.1 million views and 302.8K likes), remixing JD Vance saying he’s a Never Trump Guy.

It’s a banger!

@casadimusicReplying to @casadimusic JD Vance is a Never Trump Guy. Kamala Harris for President #nevertrumpguy #kamalaharris #Democrat #kamalahq

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Taylor Lorenz had a solid deep dive into them and their story in a recent newsletter. One tidbit really stood out: “Neither producer was particularly excited by Biden, but when Harris became the nominee, they went all in.”

As you’ve seen throughout this newsletter… that definitely seems to be a trend.

News & platform updates

• A new book chronicles how young women are moving left and becoming deeply involved in politics, whereas young men are moving to the right and mostly checking out.

• TikTok is backing away from its rewards program under pressure from the EU, which claimed that this feature of the app made it too addictive and harmful, especially to children.

• Influencers are feeling good about the new Democratic ticket – and gaining a whole lot of new followers because of it.

• Spending even a little time on TikTok appears to negatively impact a woman’s body image.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletteris a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.

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As the dust settles on Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee, attention has turned to Donald Trump’s running mate… and some of his weirder quotes and general beliefs about the world.

In the past 7 days, the TikTok conversation around Vance has been overwhelmingly negative. According to social analytics platform Zelf, 76% of the top-performing posts mentioning Vance on the platform have been negative, while just 18% were positive. 

The most-viewed video mentioning the unpopular VP candidate is this funky remix of Vance’s infamous line stating that he is “a Never Trump Guy.” It’s received 2.8 million views. There are also A LOT of hot takes on Vance’s (false, but internet famous) affinity for couches. Here are a few to check out, if you’re looking for some sometimes NSFW cushion humor.

But the couch jokes have nothing on the ire of the “childless cat ladies.”

For context, way back in 2021, Vance claimed that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." That quote reemerged this week and the “childless cat ladies” had some thoughts.  Dozens of cat owners took to TikTok to share reaction videos of their cats listening to Vance’s offensive remarks. 

Here are just a few videos of cats not impressed with Vance, which have received almost 4 million views and over 631K likes. We also saw bangers like this one: 

@alina_bockExpecting #TikTok to do your thibk and start a #TikTokdance trend #childlesscatlady

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As they say, if you’re coming for the childless cat ladies, you best not miss. Vance is learning that the hard way.

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 62,400 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1 billion views.

9.2% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 1.64% were neutral, and 89.16% were positive. These were the top ten most-viewed:

Team Harris had some big wins this week. Footage of Harris from an Atlanta rally went viral, especially when, speaking directly to Donald Trump she said, “If you have something to say, say it to my face.” That video from @kamalahq received 6.3 million views and over 1.2 million likes. Just on her own feed, content from her Atlanta rally, which included cameos from Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion, got over 18.7 million views and over 3.865 million likes.

The top video mentioning Harris this week was a viral news clip shared by @anaveragedad. It showed footage of Harris dropping out of the race in 2019. The post has been taken down and the account has been deleted, presumably because it confused users into thinking that she’s currently dropping out of the race. 

The other most viewed  Harris video on TikTok this week came from @thedailymail sharing her first presidential campaign video (featuring Beyoncé’s Freedom). It received 12.7 million views and over 2.3 million likes.

@dailymailKamala Harris shares her FIRST video for her Presidential campaign against Republican nominee President Donald Trump. The video featuring Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’ was posted to X and Harris wrote: I’m Kamala Harris, and I’m running for President of the United States.” This comes after Beyoncé gave Kamala Harris permission to use her song ‘Freedom’ for her presidential campaign #kamalaharris #president #uspresident #beyonce #freedom #campaign #2024election

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And if you’re looking for some fire content, check out this video of Donald Trump mocking Kamala Harris about opting for the prosecutor over the convicted felon and then Harris chiming in “I approve this message.”

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 83,700 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1.2 billion views.

68.83% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 0.93% were neutral, and 30.24% were positive. These were the top ten most-liked:

According to Zelf, most of the top posts about Trump were actually Harris hits against him. Though @WalterMasterson (more on him below) did make the week’s list with this video attacking Trump’s proposed tax policies.

The most-viewed video mentioning Trump came from @rap, which shared this video of Trump greeted by cheering crowds while “Many Men” by 50 Cent blares in the background. It has received over 20 million views. 

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was Women’s Rights/Abortion Access.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

Some top posts on the topic were this remix of then-Senator Harris questioning Brett Kavanaugh about whether or not there are laws that give the government power to make decisions about the male body, and this video of Megan Thee Stallion at a Harris rally declaring that “If you want to keep loving your body you know who to vote for.” Another came from @thegoodliars, with a man-on-the-street style interview debunking anti-abortion misinformation. 

The next most popular issue was the candidates’ fitness to serve.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

The Harris campaign now has two TikTok accounts! They still have @KamalaHQ, but now they also have @KamalaHarris, which launched late last week. We’ll be sharing data from both accounts to get a better understanding of their collective impact. 

This week, her combined accounts gained 388.4 million new views and posted 36 videos. Their top performing video this past week was with @LanceBass saying “Bye Bye Bye” to Donald Trump in November. It garnered 41.6m views and 3.6 million likes.

In short order, the Harris campaign’s accounts have reached parity with Trump’s 500 million views on his content. 

Over on Team Trump, they gained 139 million new views this past week and posted three new videos this week. 

Two of those videos feature Donald Trump with YouTube/UFC influencer Jake Paul. You can watch them here and here. That second video is the two of them calling Harris stupid. 

His third video, which received significantly more views than the other two, is silent, with a note that says “This sound isn’t available.” Presumably, they used some copyrighted music that got pulled from the platform, though that’s just an educated guess. Sound or not, it didn’t stop 1.5 million people from smashing that like button on this supercut of Trump dancing, getting off a plane or declaring “Kamala you’re fired.” (From what exactly isn’t clear, since she’s the nominee, not the incumbent. But maybe it made more sense with the intended audio).

Creator Spotlight: @WalterMasterson

Ever see a guy on TikTok eating – extravagantly – while making a simple, but cutting, remark about a story in the news? Then you might have seen content from today’s creator spotlight @WalterMasterson. 

Walter has a bit, and he repeats the bit constantly. But he does it well. And he’s gained over 2 million followers and gotten just shy of 100 million likes playing out said bit.

So here’s the deal—he’s trim, well-kempt, and nicely dressed. He’s almost always preparing to eat food in an elaborate and over-the-top way.

Here’s an example where he’s sitting at a nice restaurant, pouring dressing onto his salad, and decrying, “so Republicans want to ban IVF and then shame women for not having kids.” He then takes a bite, nods his head, laughs with his eyes and declares, “got it!”

That’s the bit. But his numbers are massive. That specific video referenced above got 6.4 million views and 723,900 likes. This video about an INCEL dating app that can’t get women to join has 7.9 million views and 1.1 million likes. And here’s one about the Trump shooting with  24.2 million views and  3.5 million likes.

His bio on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram reads simply "Comedian" (quotes his). He also posts videos of himself trolling school boards, showing up at events, etc. But it’s the shit-eating posts that really seem to be breaking through the algorithm.

News & platform updates

• Democrats have finally learned the value of sh*tposting, according to WIRED’s Makena Kelly

• The Washington Post took a look at “The Online Army Supercharging Harris’ campaign.” 

• Mass food poisoning hit the TikTok team at their office in Singapore. Hope everyone’s okay!

• Last week we reported that TikTok seemed to be trying to radicalize young Germans. This week, it’s been reported that TikTok has a Nazi problem right here at home.

• While Donald Trump might be wracking up huge numbers on TikTok, Republicans aren’t joining him on the platform.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.

He misspeaks. He stops and stares. He looks and sounds confused.

Well, the vibe has shifted. We are officially in brat summer.

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Now that Biden is not running, and has thrown his full support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, the energy on TikTok is going (coco)nuts. (Kamala even got her own awkward Harry Daniels singing video, which now has 6.7+ million and 1.4+ million likes.) 

The right is struggling to find ways to define her, their attacks at the moment mostly centered around the fact that she has a unique laugh and… 

Well that’s kind of as far as they’ve gotten so far. 

But while most of this week’s top political posts are folks getting excited for Kamala, the vibe shift is equally strong for Donald Trump.

While he’s always had plenty of detractors on TikTok, his supporters seem quiet this week.

The top posts about Donald Trump this week are him refusing to say who he supports in the Russia/Ukraine war, the “21 times club champ” being an absolute horrible putter, him having second thoughts on — and just generally being annoyed with — his choice for running mate, and him being afraid to debate VP Harris.

Oh yeah, our old friend @ufologiamg (who has gone viral several times poking fun at President Biden’s age) turned their ire on Trump, with a Simpsons meme mocking the former President’s hair. While all of this accounts videos are the same audio, with Simpsons clips spliced together with real world footage, don’t sleep on it. This post alone got 13.4+ million views in just 5 days.

Basically, this femininomenon – or, more specifically, Kamala-nomenon – has people extremely energized on TikTok, and Republicans are clearly on their back foot and have no idea what to do about this energy or about Vice President Harris. They’re certainly trying to respond (and having some success, like this viral anti-Kamala video from @news_bubble and this one from @mommyrn88 ) – but overwhelmingly, Kamala is winning TikTok this week. 

NOTE: The Zelf dashboard we use is currently updating to accommodate all the rapid shifts we’ve seen in the last week – and so we are not including RFK Jr. in this week’s newsletter.

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Top posts: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 62,300 posts mentioning Biden and 59,800 posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 2.5 billion views. 

60% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Biden were negative, 9% were neutral, and 31% were positive. These were the top ten most-viewed:

18% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 14% were neutral, and 68% were positive. These were the top ten most-viewed:

And that is the end of our short tenure covering Joe Biden in this newsletter. Because… @BidenHQ is no more. Love live @KamalaHQ. With this section, we’re going to focus on breaking this transition down (although we definitely encourage everyone to also check out the top-viewed posts mentioning them above).

Just like everywhere else online, the Biden campaign has officially morphed into the Kamala campaign. (They went from using his last name to her first name FWIW — so we will be matching them accordingly.)

Under BidenHQ, a good post reached a million impressions. And the occasional viral post reached 2+ million. In fact, by our count, since their very first post came out strong with over 10 million impressions, they have only crossed the 2 million impression threshold 9 times. And all of those were in the 2 million impression range. As of the time of this writing, they’ve posted 11 times since Biden’s announcement. 7 of those 11 posts surpassed 2 million impressions. And one - declaring we need a femininomenon - surpassed 36+ million impressions. We here at FYP call those Taylor Swift numbers, if you were wondering.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 168,800 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 2.7 billion views. 

45% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 14% were neutral, and 41% were positive. These were the top ten most-liked:

The top post by far mentioning Donald Trump this week was this one from @cbsnews of his 17-year-old granddaughter speaking about her grandpa at the RNC – which received a whopping 57+ million views, more than 4 times the next most-viewed Trump post.

As we noted above, however, the vibes for Trump on TikTok were a bit more negative and/or neutral than we’ve been seeing in weeks past (when the vibe has been very positive for him). Videos like this one from @nowthisimpact of VP Harris bashing him and Project 2025 and this one from @masterchillhq demonstrating how polarized and angry politics has gotten in the Trump era also garnered a fair amount of attention.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was the candidate’s Fitness to Serve (or lack thereof).

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The top post on the topic was from a clip from @MAGA of JD Vance questioning VP Harris’s experience: “What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” The second most popular clip was from @nowthisimpact of VP Harris calling JD Vance a “rubber stamp” for Donald Trump and the “extreme agenda” of Project 2025. And the third most popular was this clip from @real_talk_with_tom apologizing to Joe Biden for laughing at him over the years and letting him know how much he respects his decision to step down: “Joe Biden did what Donald Trump can never do — he put the country before himself, his own ego.”

The next two top issues tracked were Election Integrity and Women’s Rights/Abortion. For both of those issues, Donald Trump was heavily under water when it came to sentiment analysis. A clip of then Senator Harris questioning Brett Kavanaugh regarding abortion was shared from @huffpostpolitics and wracked up over 10.5+ million views and over 1.9+ million likes.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

Team Biden/Kamala has gained about 79 million new views this past week and posted 23 new videos (to be clear, these new views could come from their new videos or from past videos). Their top video this past week, as we mentioned a few times earlier (because this thing was everywhere!), was their video about us needing a femininomenon.

Over on Team Trump, they gained about 102.2 million new views this past week. They posted their first (and only) new video since June 23rd this week. It was a clip of Trump talking about the death of Corey Comperatore during his RNC acceptance speech. It has had nearly 70 million views. But interestingly, it’s only gotten around 425,000 likes as of writing this. When compared to that top KamalaHQ post, that seems (strangely) low.

Creator Spotlight: @theoldermillennial.1

One prominent TikTokker who is very well known on the Right (but perhaps less so on the Left) is @theoldermillennial.1. It’s actually shockingly difficult to find out his real name or any biographical details online – however, he also goes by @teameffujoe on X/Twitter (and we do wonder if he’s going to change that now). He’s racked up over 1.2+ million followers and over 35.5+ million likes on TikTok and routinely churns out viral, right-wing videos ⬇️

Some of his recent trending videos – all from within a week as of writing this and all with over 1 million views – include one about him spreading conspiracy theories about the Secret Service in the wake of the Trump shooting (which has 1.1+ million views) and another very recent one alleging that President Biden might be dead and it’s been covered up (which has 1.3+ million views).

Another tactic of The Older Millennial’s is stitching videos of liberal content creators and “rebutting” and trolling them. A particular favorite of his is @harrysisson, a very popular and well-known Biden-Harris stan. Harry Sisson is also 21 years old. So, assuming this older millennial is in fact in his late 30s to early 40s – he’s essentially spending his time on TikTok bullying someone 20 years his junior.

In the last week alone, The Older Millennial has stitched 9 of Sisson’s videos and pushed back on Sisson’s content by defending Elon Musk against Gavin Newsom, making fun of Biden's decision to drop out, and defending Donald Trump in an incredibly awkward moment with Melania. Each of these videos got at least 400,000+ views. 

The secret sauce to The Older Millennial’s videos is that he is very good at sounding logical and authoritative… while spreading information that most Americans would consider questionable at best. He’s also, as noted, not at all above some bullying. This is definitely an account to keep an eye on as we head toward November.

News & platform updates

• While it hasn’t yet rolled out to all accounts, TikTok continues rolling out the option to both use custom thumbnails on videos and to edit captions after the fact. (Both huge — and much-needed — updates if you ask us.)
  

• Last week, we reported that if you went to TikTok on a desktop, you could filter by top posts. Sadly, that feature now seems to be gone. RIP to another much-needed update that was taken from us too soon.

• One of the things TikTok Lite seems to be sacrificing is user safety.  

• Young Germans searching the app were disproportionately served content related to the far-right this year – even when they weren’t necessarily searching for it or were searching for another party.

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletteris a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.

All of the top Trump posts were either directly about the shooting or alluded to it in some way.

The top post of the week in both views and engagement, according to Zelf, was a clip of a 50 Cent concert where the rapper superimposed Donald Trump’s face on the album cover of Get Rich or Die Tryin.

@loga1o50 cent— Many Men Live in Boston @50 Cent ⠀ #50cent #hiphop #rap #gunit #trump #maga #donaldtrump #usa #republican #conservative #america #biden #politics

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Obviously Donald Trump is no gangster. He spends his days playing golf and eating omelets at his private club. There are those who think his being a felon – or now getting shot at – will make him more popular with Black voters. Those both sound like highly problematic tropes to us. And we’ve seen nothing in the content to back it up. But it’s definitely a narrative Republicans are trying to make stick as seen here and here.

And several of the other top posts of the week alluded to his newfound power, like this video and this video. 

Interestingly, many of the top posts simply showing footage of the shooting came from international accounts – and that’s a continuation of a trend we’ve seen with international media or simply international accounts getting pretty involved in this election on TikTok.

There wasn’t a single mention of JD Vance in the top posts, though we’re quite sure we’ll be seeing his perfectly manicured beard in the weeks to come. (Unless of course he’s shaved it off by then.)

This contrast – especially as Trump continues painting himself in this “bad boy” image to appeal to voters he thinks it might resonate with – is definitely something to pay attention to. Because by the looks of what trending on TikTok this past week… it seems to be working.

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Top posts: Joe Biden

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 45,800 posts mentioning Biden on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 1 billion views. 

45% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Biden were negative, 21% were neutral, and 34% were positive. These were the top ten most-liked:

If you haven’t seen it yet, there is a bizarre trend of creators “shipping” Joe Biden and Donald Trump and making “romantic” edits of them (the genre is called #Triden) – and the top videos mentioning President Biden this week was a “ship” edit from @diorgr6nde.

A ton of the content about President Biden this week was also about his recent gaffes: several top videos were about a moment where President Biden accidentally referred to Vice President Harris as Trump, including one from @brentnatzle and one from @dailymail.

Along these lines, a video from @thedudebroshow that shows President Zelenskyy’s reaction when President Biden mistakenly referred to him as President Putin garnered a whopping 22,100,000+ views and 1,000,000+ likes.

Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 338,000 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 5 billion views. 

25% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 14% were neutral, and 61% were positive. These were the top ten most-liked:

The overwhelming majority of the top videos mentioning Trump were on the attempted assassination last Saturday. Videos that reported on the shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally from @cbsnews – including one of Trump when it occurred and one interview with an eyewitness – amassed a huge amount of views and likes.

Similarly, videos of Trump entering the 2024 RNC to much fanfare on Monday with a bandage on his ear also garnered a lot of attention – specifically this video from @cnn and this video from @abcnews.

On a more negative note from Trump, a video from @lovelyquotes1318 featuring Michelle Obama unequivocally laying out the case that Trump is the wrong choice for this country also gained a lot of attention this past week.

On the issues…

Out of 15 major political issues that we’re tracking each week with the help of Zelf’s tracking tools, the political topic receiving the most engagement last week was the Trump assassination attempt.

Note: For purposes of this newsletter, “Top-Performing Posts” can be defined as any posts that TikTok displays in its search functionality. Many posts that receive very few views are not distributed widely and are excluded from search. 

The top posts in this issue area were this one from @brettporter13 of country singer Cody Johnson denouncing violence at his concert, this one from @joshuamorrison272 that allegedly shows Trump’s detail taking him to the hospital, and this one from @dailymail about the death of the shooter.

Other top issues this week were the age and fitness of both Biden and Trump, highlighted by this top video we mentioned above from @dailymail about the moment when President Biden accidentally referred to Vice President Harris as Trump, and the integrity of the 2024 election, which was highlighted in this video from @jade._meg with a joke referencing pop superstar Chappell Roan.

From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

Team Biden gained about 9.3 million views this past week and posted 22 new videos (to be clear, these new views could come from their new videos or from past videos). Their top video this past week was a clip of President Biden’s remarks condemning the assassination attempt on Donald Trump – it garnered 466,800+ views and 31,500+ likes.

Over on Team Trump, they gained 49.1 million new views this past week. They actually haven’t posted a new video since June 23rd, so all of their new views are on the three videos that they currently have posted – a pretty impressive feat.

And finally, Team RFK Jr. gained 36.8 million views last week and posted 15 new videos. Four of these videos got over 1 million views – and the top video was a clip of RFK Jr. saying he’s the only one who can actually beat Trump. It has amassed a whopping 4.2+ million views and 283,000+ likes.

Creator Spotlight: @dailymail

The Daily Mail is essentially the British version of The New York Post. While both do report the news, they’re known for their sensationalist journalism, a heavy focus on celebrity gossip, and leaning in hard on attention-grabbing headlines. But while The Post has less than 1 million followers on TikTok, @dailymail has over 9 million, with over 670 million lifetime likes.

Their top posts involve animals, kids, and embarrassing moments in random people’s lives. And when it comes to embarrassing people, they seem to have it out for President Biden. (To be fair, they also sometimes go after Trump… but definitely seem to prefer going after President Biden.)

They’ve wracked up some huge numbers showing President Biden stumbling over his words or simply looking awkward. And of course, they never seem to let the truth of what was actually happening in these videos get in the way of a good story.

Remember that video of Joe Biden looking lost and awkward at the G7, seemingly waving at no one, while his fellow world leaders tried to get his attention? The Daily Mail shared a clip of that moment that wracked up almost 4 million views. The problem? It was intentionally misleading. 

Turn the camera just a bit, and suddenly we see that President Biden was actually watching skydivers descend onto the field. See the more accurate version of the video here. That latter version was shared by Politifact, which rated the claim he wandered off at the G7 Summit “False.” Their video got less than 7000 views – less than 0.2% of the views on the Daily Mail’s post.

What’s working?

Project 2025. Content about Project 2025 across social media, including TikTok, is having a moment. According to Zelf’s analysis, the top TikTok posts about the far-right plan to take over the federal government include this one from @zactivist with 4.7 million views and this one from @dashdobrofsky with 4.5 million views.

For more on how Project 2025 is breaking through online, check out last Friday’s issue of FWIW. 

News & platform updates

• Lia Haberman flagged that TikTok now lists creator videos by “latest” or most “popular” but *only* on the desktop version as of right now.

• TikTok is apparently partnering up with Eventbrite to allow creators to add Eventbrite ticket links directly to their videos.

• Dozens of TikTok users started hawking merch about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in real time over the weekend. Some even live-streamed themselves designing the shirts to boost sales.

• We know that a lot of Gen Zers get their news from TikTok… but it turns out that they are also turning to the app for other important information: a recent study found that a large number of Zoomers use TikTok as “their main form of health advice.”

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform. 

Despite its widespread use, TikTok is kind of a black box. Users are fed content by an opaque algorithm via their “For You” page (aka #FYP), which is a highly personalized feed that serves up posts created by strangers based on the user’s interests and likelihood to watch. Many of the major accounts sharing political content on TikTok are often unknown to the national media or high-profile politicos and tend to be very different from the legacy political organizations and influencers who have built up followings on other platforms like Facebook or Instagram. 

That’s why many top Democratic donors, campaign operatives, and mainstream political journalists were surprised to learn recently that there is a large amount of pro-Trump content currently dominating the political conversation on the platform. One of the primary goals of this newsletter is to help provide more transparency and insight into what’s really happening with political content on the app. 

Here’s how we’ll do it: Starting next week, we’ll be sharing even more charts and data to help measure the breadth, intensity, and sentiment of content on TikTok that is covering — and almost certainly impacting — the presidential election. 

We’ll use a powerful new analytics platform to dig through all the posts mentioning Trump or Biden, quantify key trends, add context to the viral view counts, and shine a light on creators you’ve probably never heard of. We’ll share what top political issues are being discussed on the platform and also include a section on what content has been tested to move the needle against Trump. 

…But for this inaugural issue, we have just a few snippets of data to give you a sneak peek at what we’ll be sharing here each week. 

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Top posts: Joe Biden

There were 22,875 posts mentioning Biden on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 427 million views. These were the top ten most-viewed:

The conversation around Joe Biden last week on TikTok (like elsewhere online) was pretty rough for the President. Many of the top posts continued to highlight his age and whether or not he should drop out of the race. @thedailymail, which has become a leading anti-Biden voice on the platform, shared a popular video of VP Harris almost referring to Biden as the “vice president,” and highlighted scenes from a disastrous White House press conference about the President’s health. 

The most viewed video on the platform mentioning Biden was this one from a Portuguese language account (@ufologiamg) that posts conspiracy clips from the Simpsons. It’s basically a highlight reel of the President looking old and robotic, interspersed with scenes from the Simpsons. It's been seen 25 million times. 

There was at least one bright spot for Biden, however. Rep. Maxine Waters, who has gone through waves of virality online in the past, broke through in her defense of Biden with this viral moment posted by @donlemonofficial. Biden had another strong defender in TikToker Harry Sisson, a big Biden stan with almost 1 million followers on the app, who appeared on Piers Morgan’s program to fight back against the President’s critics. 

Top posts: Donald Trump

There were 32,134 posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 552 million views. These were the top ten most-viewed:

The vibes weren’t exactly great for Donald Trump on TikTok last week either. Several videos, including this one from @hal_for_ny__ and this one from @couriernewsroom, highlighted Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. @thedailyshow also had a viral clip making fun of MAGA supporters, which has been seen over 4.1 million times. 

The most-viewed video mentioning Trump came from @7newsaustrailia, which featured behind-the-scenes footage of the former President on the golf course discussing Biden’s debate performance. 

…and in case you weren’t aware, Russian government propaganda outlet RT is on TikTok (@rt.newsmedia) and shared a widely-viewed video of Vladimir Putin essentially saying Trump can help bring peace to Ukraine. (Ummm, cool. Thanks Vlad!)

From the campaign trail

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

Donald Trump’s campaign didn’t post on TikTok at all last week - but their three previously posted videos have now been watched over 300 million times. NBD. 

Team Biden kept up its heavy cadence of posting on the platform, sharing a dozen posts attacking Trump’s ties to Project 2025 and highlighting a few clips of Democrats supportive of his candidacy, including AOC. His most viewed post in the past week was this Fourth of July Project 2025 crossover post.  

Lastly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign (which is very good at TikTok content creation, FWIW) published this video of the would-be spoiler candidate cooking dog food as penance for a viral news story reporting he barbecued and ate a dog years ago. The video has received over 6 million views. 

@teamkennedy2024Because of some recent irresponsible journalism, I’m in the dog house 🐕 #dogs #rfkjr

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Creator Spotlight: @celebs.against.trump

Unlike other social media platforms dominated by legacy political organizations and pundits, some of the most impactful political accounts on TikTok are run by people you’ve likely never heard of. This week we’re spotlighting @celebs.against.trump, an account that only launched on May 31st, 2024. In just over one month, the account has amassed over 130,000 followers, and its 68 videos have been viewed more than 32.5 million times and received 3.7 million likes. 

Celebs Against Trump employs a pretty simple content strategy that is paying off big time: They skim the internet for any clip (old or new) of a famous person criticizing Trump and repackage it for publishing on TikTok. In fact, it’s such a smart strategy, we’re wondering if there’s not a political operative or two running the account. We shot them a DM, and have yet to hear back. 👀

News & platform updates

• In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last week, pro-Biden creator Olivia Juliana explained how Democrats are up against “an ocean of MAGA content” on TikTok.

• The Washington Post spoke with several TikTok creators who detailed their engagement with the Biden campaign and the White House. 

• TikTok released an updated version of its “What’s Next” platform trends report. 

• In case you missed it, our friends at CredoIQ released an initial roundup of top-performing TikTok content following last month’s presidential debate. 

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email. 

The #FYP newsletteris a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann.