TikTok Takes Its Mark

The platform has not been kind to Mark Robinson this week.

Josh Klemons 💪💙💪

Kyle Tharp

, and

Lucy Ritzmann

Sep 26, 2024

North Carolina is a pivotal swing state in the upcoming presidential election, with the power to potentially hand the election to either Trump or Harris.

While there’s plenty of focus on the presidential race playing out across the Tar Heel State, their gubernatorial campaign – between current Attorney General Josh Stein and current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson – had a massive shake-up this week. CNN discovered that Robinson had made dozens of incredibly disturbing and deeply insensitive comments on porn forums. A few hours later, it came out that Mark Robinson had also been on Ashley Madison, a site for married people looking for affairs. And while this story started in the traditional media, TikTok quickly got into the action.

@scott_c_ shared that Robinson is fully in the Find Out phase now (presumably in reference to the saying, f*** around and find out) and received some pretty good attention on that video. Similarly, @timfullerton, @saira_csu, and @genzperspectivepod all had popular videos breaking down the situation – and the following news that almost all of Robinson’s staff had quit after CNN dropped their story.

People were also quick to get in on the bit: @vinn_ayy had a pretty funny video cosplaying as Mark Robinson’s new campaign manager.

And that’s just individual users. If you take a look at the traditional media outlets sharing the story on TikTok, the number of content views and likes skyrocket.

For example, @cbsmornings received 392k views and 15k likes on their post about how Robinson was refusing to drop out following the news, and @abcworldnews received 718k views and 17k likes on a clip of David Muir breaking down the situation.

And trust us, when it comes to these media outlets getting attention on video about the Mark Robinson story, the list goes on and on. This is actually in keeping with a trend that our friends over at CAP Action have been analyzing: their data shows that media accounts, especially legacy media accounts like CBS, NBC, and The Daily Mail, have seen a huge amount of growth in their TikTok views since that first presidential debate between Trump and Biden really kicked things off – but for individual creators and other accounts that post about politics, growth has actually been pretty flat over that time.

Back on the Mark Robinson story, it’s also worth mentioning that JD Vance has become somewhat dragged into the scandal, after getting asked “if there’s something disqualifying about the comments uncovered by CNN that wasn’t disqualifying by any of the previous comments he made” as well as whether the Trump campaign still endorses Mark Robinson.

Such clips have been shared many, many, many times.

Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. As it turns out, week after week, 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.

As we’ve noted before, this isn’t necessarily a good thing for Trump. While Donald Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the content about him on TikTok is negative, especially as compared to content about Kamala Harris.

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:

We should note that while this data may be imprecise and certainly has a margin for error, it continues to show a trend that the vibes are generally 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 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.

The issue of the candidates “fitness to serve” continues to dominate the political conversation on TikTok.

In what feels like a bit of a callback, one of the top posts in this category came from @dailymail and showed President Biden awkwardly forgetting who he’s introducing to 31.7 million viewers. This is the type of content we saw a ton of before July but haven't had too much of since VP Harris became the nominee.

The next most popular post in this category, with 16.2 million views, was once again that @dailymail clip of something shouting “felons can’t vote.” And finally, @meidastouch posted a video showing pieces of a documentary from Lev Parnas about Donald Trump not knowing anything about Ukraine while serving as President, which has over 4.5 million views.

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:

Last week we mentioned that @kamalahq was about to cross a billion views on the platform. This week, they did it. With the additional views from @kamalaharris, the campaign has received over 1.5 billion lifetime views on its content.

This week, Harris’ combined TikTok accounts gained 133.1 million new views and posted 38 videos.

Their top post of the week, which featured a fun ditty showing VP Harris wearing a suit and Converse over Demi Lovato’s La La Land (with the line “Who said I can’t wear my Converse with my dress?”), got 21.9 million views and amassed 3.1 million likes.

Their next most popular post was Donald Trump saying that if he lost, he wouldn’t run again in 4 years, with the tacked-on “I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.” It got 6 million views and 1.1 million likes. That was followed by a photo carousel of Donald Trump and Mark Robinson with 5.4 million views and 601.8K likes.

Another notable post featured Bill Nye the Science Guy talking about climate change and why Donald Trump’s views on the subject are dangerous. It got 3.6 million views and 870.1K likes.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 157.4 million new views across their accounts and posted 39 new videos.

Their top post was Donald Trump delivering a birthday present to Liam, an 8-year-old boy with a brain disease. It got 22.4 million views and 1.9 million likes.

Their next most popular post showed Pawn Stars Rick Harrison speaking at a Trump rally to 13.1 million viewers and 1.3 million likes. That was followed by a short clip of VP Harris “debuting a Latina accent while speaking to an audience of Hispanics 🥴”. It got 10.1 million views and 771.1K likes.

Creator Spotlight: @someolddude

He might just be @someolddude (who appears to now be @somepoliticaldude in the lead-up to the election), but he’s got over half a million followers on TikTok and 25.7 million likes.

He started posting in May of 2020 and his first few videos weren’t political at all. But by June, he was interspersing political content like this into the mix and now he’s all in on politics.

He does plenty of straight content, but he also does a lot of character work, including playing a reporter and a “centrist.” He does a lot of videos playing a recurring MAGA character. You can check out a few of those out here, here and here.

The sophistic comment “we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a democratic republic” is such a popular troll across all social media channels – so you know @someolddude had to make a fun response to that old line.

News & platform updates

Could creators save TikTok? They’re trying.

McEntee and Masterson are apparently two sides of the same coin. Got it?
Come across a gross and not-so-believable story about VP Harris in your feed recently? The person posting it might have been getting paid to do so.
TikTok is expanding its subscription features for creators.

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.