The Biggest TikTok hits against Trump
It’s pretty clear why Donald Trump is ducking a second debate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
modest requests.
To help put those large, multi-million TilTok numbers in context, what kind of numbers are there for pro Trump/ anti-Harris TikTok posts?
Second, if there is a connection between these viral TikTok posts and views and stronger support for Harris, and assuming demographics of TikTok lean young, what is your thought on TikTok posts having an impact on swing states?