“The TikTok Election”

Introducing a new weekly newsletter tracking the Presidential race on TikTok

Kyle Tharp, Josh Klemons, and Lucy Ritzmann

Jul 11, 2024

In July 2020, there were around 100 million TikTok users in the United States. Four years later, that number has ballooned to around 170 million. It’s a highly addictive social media platform and one that is increasingly a source of news and political information for Americans of all ages.

Despite its widespread use, TikTok is kind of a black box. Users are fed content by an opaque algorithm via their “For You” page (aka #FYP), which is a highly personalized feed that serves up posts created by strangers based on the user’s interests and likelihood to watch. Many of the major accounts sharing political content on TikTok are often unknown to the national media or high-profile politicos and tend to be very different from the legacy political organizations and influencers who have built up followings on other platforms like Facebook or Instagram.

That’s why many top Democratic donors, campaign operatives, and mainstream political journalists were surprised to learn recently that there is a large amount of pro-Trump content currently dominating the political conversation on the platform. One of the primary goals of this newsletter is to help provide more transparency and insight into what’s really happening with political content on the app.

Here’s how we’ll do it: Starting next week, we’ll be sharing even more charts and data to help measure the breadth, intensity, and sentiment of content on TikTok that is covering — and almost certainly impacting — the presidential election.

We’ll use a powerful new analytics platform to dig through all the posts mentioning Trump or Biden, quantify key trends, add context to the viral view counts, and shine a light on creators you’ve probably never heard of. We’ll share what top political issues are being discussed on the platform and also include a section on what content has been tested to move the needle against Trump.

…But for this inaugural issue, we have just a few snippets of data to give you a sneak peek at what we’ll be sharing here each week.

From the campaign trail

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

Donald Trump’s campaign didn’t post on TikTok at all last week - but their three previously posted videos have now been watched over 300 million times. NBD.

Team Biden kept up its heavy cadence of posting on the platform, sharing a dozen posts attacking Trump’s ties to Project 2025 and highlighting a few clips of Democrats supportive of his candidacy, including AOC. His most viewed post in the past week was this Fourth of July Project 2025 crossover post.

Lastly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign (which is very good at TikTok content creation, FWIW) published this video of the would-be spoiler candidate cooking dog food as penance for a viral news story reporting he barbecued and ate a dog years ago. The video has received over 6 million views.

@teamkennedy2024 Because of some recent irresponsible journalism, I’m in the dog house 🐕 #dogs #rfkjr

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Creator Spotlight: @celebs.against.trump

Unlike other social media platforms dominated by legacy political organizations and pundits, some of the most impactful political accounts on TikTok are run by people you’ve likely never heard of. This week we’re spotlighting @celebs.against.trump, an account that only launched on May 31st, 2024. In just over one month, the account has amassed over 130,000 followers, and its 68 videos have been viewed more than 32.5 million times and received 3.7 million likes.

Celebs Against Trump employs a pretty simple content strategy that is paying off big time: They skim the internet for any clip (old or new) of a famous person criticizing Trump and repackage it for publishing on TikTok. In fact, it’s such a smart strategy, we’re wondering if there’s not a political operative or two running the account. We shot them a DM, and have yet to hear back. 👀

News & platform updates

In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last week, pro-Biden creator Olivia Juliana explained how Democrats are up against “an ocean of MAGA content” on TikTok.

The Washington Post spoke with several TikTok creators who detailed their engagement with the Biden campaign and the White House.

TikTok released an updated version of its “What’s Next” platform trends report.

In case you missed it, our friends at CredoIQ released an initial roundup of top-performing TikTok content following last month’s presidential debate.

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 newsletteris a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann.