Don’t Call It A Vibe Shift
Or do. Cause something is definitely happening.
What a difference a week makes!
Last week, you couldn’t scroll political TikTok without bumping into countless videos intended to enfeeble and belittle President Biden.
He misspeaks. He stops and stares. He looks and sounds confused.
Well, the vibe has shifted. We are officially in brat summer.
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.
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.
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?
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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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