The biggest TikTok attacks on Harris

These are some of the most viral videos attacking Harris on the platform.

Josh Klemons 💪💙💪

Kyle Tharp

, and

Lucy Ritzmann

Oct 10, 2024

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:

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.

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.

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.