Millions lean in to debate content on TikTok
Migrants aren’t eating dogs, but according to just about everyone, Kamala ate Donald’s lunch.
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.
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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.
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!).
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 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.
Trump js Fucking NAZI
Enough said
Vote Harris Save America