@JD and @Tim_Walz take the stage

“The Rules Were You Weren’t Going to Fact Check”

Josh Klemons 💪💙💪

Kyle Tharp

, and

Lucy Ritzmann

Oct 03, 2024

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.