TikTok steals the spotlight

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Sep 16, 2024 View in browser
 
POLITICO Nightly logo

By Anusha Mathur

Presented by Citi

Talia Cadet, a TikTok creator and advocate, wears a button showing support for the app.

Talia Cadet, a TikTok creator and advocate, wears a button showing support for the app outside of the U.S. Court of Appeals today. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

INFINITE SCROLL — TikTok is having its day in court. This morning, three federal judges began questioning whether a ban on the company — signed into law by President Joe Biden five months ago — is legal.

The political backdrop was different when Congress banned the app with bipartisan support in April. At the time, the presidential race was just getting started — President Joe Biden and Donald Trump had only recently clinched their parties’ nomination. But in the intervening months, with assassination attempts, a change at the top of the Democratic ticket and a multitude of other news events, the complexion of the race for the White House has changed and so, too, has TikTok’s role in the political ecosystem. That doesn’t necessarily affect the court case, but it’s becoming clearer to all sides that TikTok is increasingly essential to news consumers, and to both parties’ efforts to shape the conversation around the election.

“It has grown enormously, to the point where it’s among the most dominant forms of communication in the election.” James Haggerty, a communications consultant and attorney who has worked on First Amendment issues, told POLITICO.

The numbers bear that out, in particular for young people — 48 percent of TikTok users under 30 say that keeping up with politics/political issues is a reason why they’re on the platform. Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults ages 18-24 use the app regularly as a “search engine” to find information.

Much of the election-oriented content is propelled by an ecosystem of hundreds of creators who have designed their entire social media brands around politics — often through partisan lenses. At the conventions this summer, in recognition of their growing clout, both campaigns gave credentials to those creators to facilitate their work and amplify their voices.

These accounts — many of which have more followers on TikTok than mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post — drive how users consume political news and serve as funnels for political discussion on the app. Their content, however, is anything but traditional, and it’s often more politically charged than what one might encounter in mainstream outlets or even on other social media platforms. Several of these accounts are funded by major political party donors, and blur the line between news reporting and advocacy, carefully choosing clips to go viral and align with certain political points of view.

Even as TikTok access hangs in the balance in court, these accounts will play an outsized role in the last 50 days of the presidential race. Here are five to keep an eye on.

@WalterMasterson: Walter Masterson, a politics-focused comedian, has built his brand around man-on-the-street style content, where he openly debates MAGA Republicans and goes undercover as a Trump supporter to provide an inside look into right-wing populism.

His account, which has amassed 2.4 million followers and 115 million likes in total, took off in the wake of January 6, as he was one of the few comedians on the steps of Capitol Hill talking to protestors before the insurrection. His interviews with insurrectionists were used as evidence by the FBI and featured during the congressional hearings about the Capitol attacks.

Since then, Masterson has consistently gone viral for explaining politically-charged terms and pointing out what he views as hypocrisy within the Republican Party, punctuating these videos with the phrase “got it” as his video signature.

His brand thrives off heated political debate, as Republican influencers often “stitch” Masterson’s content (include clips of his videos within their own to refute him), and Masterson stitches those videos back to defend himself.

@Daterightstuff: If you see a Walter Masterson video being repeatedly stitched and challenged, there’s a good chance @Daterightstuff CEO John David McEntee II is behind it. In 2022, the former Trump administration official launched a conservative dating app called “The Right Stuff,” funded by right-wing billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In addition to promoting conservative values through the content of the videos, @Daterightstuff also functions as a gathering place for conservatives, both through discussion in the TikTok comment section and by directing people to connect on the app.

McEntee’s videos outline conservative positions — like binary notions of gender, opposition to welfare, access to firearms — in simple terms and poke holes in common liberal arguments. His TikToks consistently receive millions of views. A recent viral video, viewed by over 8.2 million people, questioned why “the same people who said the economy was great under Biden are now preaching that Kamala will fix the economy.”

@Katmabu: Formerly a staffer at Media Matters for America, a progressive research and information center, Kat Abughazaleh was laid off earlier this year when MMA was hit with repeated lawsuits. But she has soared to prominence on her personal account, gaining 215,000 followers — 185,000 more than her former employer.

She consistently receives tens to hundreds of thousands of likes on her news recaps and short political explainers. Her content is mostly focused on calling out right-wing politics and policies, and she has differentiated her content through intensive video editing and splicing.

Unlike many of the aforementioned platforms, which mostly source videos from legacy media and share them as-is on TikTok, Abughazaleh splices together clips to tell cohesive stories. She pairs these existing open source clips with her own political commentary to tell cohesive stories.

@DailyWire: The Daily Wire, founded in 2014 by political commentator Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, is both a political content creator and a funnel for outside information to enter the app and be further spread by smaller accounts. It supplies footage of candidates and political analysis that supports Trump and takes down Harris.

It seeks to position itself as an antidote to what it asserts is a left-leaning bias in mainstream media, encouraging the 3.3 million followers to turn to DailyWire digital platforms for news instead of traditional outlets.

Its most viral videos provide ammunition to TikTok users on the right by pointing out what it views as Democratic hypocrisy, such as highlighting the Obama family’s personal wealth. A popular recent TikTok showed footage from the presidential debate with a “fact-check count,” demonstrating that Trump was fact-checked four times by the moderators while Harris was not fact-checked at all, underscoring the point that the debate was unfair and biased. Another video compiled dozens of Harris tweets opposing Trump’s border wall and concluded with a screenshot of an Axios story titled, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.”

@NowThisImpact: NowThis Media is a left-wing social media-focused news organization founded in 2012 by The Huffington Post’s co-founder and former CEO. While NowThis Media has an Instagram presence, newsletter and online homepage, the crown jewel of its social media content is TikTok, where it goes by the handle NowThisImpact.

It focuses on sharing highlights from interviews that non-news savvy TikTok users might not have seen otherwise, featuring videos of prominent conservatives endorsing Harris on national news networks, digging up old clips of Donald Trump and sharing pro-left wing political ads.

It frequently “overlays” its reporters on top of videos to cut in and explain stories and complex political concepts. NowThisImpact also uses viral TikTok audio to mock Trump. Last week it posted a video taking down Trump’s attacks on Harris saying the “best he’s come up with so far is saying she laughs too much.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AnushaMathur4.

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The global healthcare system is in need of a checkup. Life expectancy in many western countries has stalled over the past 15 years, while healthcare costs are rising to potentially unsustainable levels. The new Citi GPS Report, Future of Healthcare, sheds light on key strategies that could revolutionize our healthcare system – such as restructuring healthcare delivery and harnessing data-integrated digital technology. Learn more here.

 
What'd I Miss?

— Biden: Secret Service ‘needs more help’: President Joe Biden said today that the Secret Service “needs more help” after the possible attempted assassination of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Biden told reporters as he left the White House that more must be done a day after the agency thwarted a shooter who had hidden himself near Trump’s Florida golf course, where the former president was playing.

— Palm Beach County sheriff says suspected gunman didn’t appear to have clear shot at Trump: The day after the possible attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said that the suspected gunman did not appear to have a clear shot of the former president on the golf course. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in danger. And as a suspect was charged in connection with the incident, there were increasing calls for beefing up the former president’s Secret Service security. “From where [the gunman] was at, he would have had to wait for the president to get up to that hole and then turn and face going toward the area he was at,” Bradshaw said on “Fox & Friends” today.

— New York fire chiefs charged in bribery scheme: Federal authorities arrested and charged two chiefs in the New York City Fire Department in a corruption scheme, alleging they took at least $190,000 in bribes to expedite FDNY building inspections. Brian Cordasco and Anthony Saccavino are accused of secretly partnering with a co-conspirator to start a fire safety company while the pair were both FDNY chiefs. Businesses would pay the company to speed up their building inspections with the fire department, according to an indictment unsealed this morning by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Nightly Road to 2024

TRUMP BLAMES DEMS FOR ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pointed to “the rhetoric of [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris” as responsible for the second apparent assassination attempt against him at his Florida golf club in an interview with Fox News Digital today. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out,” Trump said in the interview, without citing specific evidence. Harris and Biden both released statements condemning political violence on Sunday.

TEAMSTERS NOD NEAR — Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said today that the powerful union could issue a presidential endorsement in the coming days, after hosting Vice President Kamala Harris for a closed-door roundtable. Harris left immediately after the meeting without talking to reporters.

O’Brien said the union is wrapping up polling of its membership ahead of an executive board meeting on Wednesday. He said those results will also be publicly released. The union’s million-plus membership is one of the largest in the country and it has long been a bedrock of the Democratic coalition.

THE NEXT SPRINGFIELD — When Joe Manning got to work on Wednesday, he sat down and penned an email to a city manager 220 miles away in Springfield, Ohio, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.. It was the day after the presidential debate, where former President Donald Trump propagated the repeatedly debunked and incendiary false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield were eating the town’s pets. As the borough manager of Charleroi — a small Pennsylvania town about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh — Manning is all too familiar with those types of xenophobic allegations, as similar claims have circulated around his borough. More than 2,000 miles away from the sleepy Pennsylvania town during a rally in Tucson, Ariz., Thursday, Trump promoted inflammatory rhetoric about Haitian migrants in Charleroi on the national stage, promoting the misleading claim that the Washington County borough’s Haitian immigrant population was costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

WEST OFF PA BALLOT — Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court today upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a bid to get independent presidential candidate Cornel West on the ballot for the November election in the battleground state. The courts sided with the secretary of state’s office under Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in rejecting West’s candidacy paperwork. The decision also sets in motion the process for counties to start printing, testing and sending out mail-in ballots to voters who requested one ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

AROUND THE WORLD

Fires burning aboard the oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea.

This photo released by the European Union's Operation Aspides shows fires burning aboard the oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea on Aug. 25. | European Union's Operation Aspides via AP

BURNING UP — Salvagers successfully towed a Greek-flagged oil tanker ablaze for weeks after attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels to a safe area without any oil spill, a European Union naval mission said today according to The Associated Press.

The Sounion reached waters away from Yemen as the Houthis meanwhile claimed that they shot down another American-made MQ-9 Reaper drone, with video circulating online showing what appeared to be a surface-to-air missile strike and flaming wreckage strewn across the ground.

The two events show the challenges still looming for the world as it tries to mitigate a monthslong campaign by the rebels over the Israel-Hamas war raging in the Gaza Strip. While the rebels allowed the Sounion to be moved, they continue to threaten ships moving through the Red Sea, a waterway that once saw $1 trillion in goods move through it a year.

ANTI-VAX — The Taliban have suspended polio vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan, the U.N. said today. It’s a devastating setback for polio eradication, since the virus is one of the world’s most infectious and any unvaccinated groups of children where the virus is spreading could undo years of progress, writes The Associated Press.

Afghanistan is one of two countries in which the spread of the potentially fatal, paralyzing disease has never been stopped. The other is Pakistan. It’s likely that the Taliban’s decision will have major repercussions for other countries in the region and beyond.

News of the suspension was relayed to U.N. agencies right before the September immunization campaign was due to start. No reason was given for the suspension, and no one from the Taliban-controlled government was immediately available for comment.

A top official from the World Health Organization said it was aware of discussions to move away from house-to-house vaccinations and instead have immunizations in places like mosques. The WHO has confirmed 18 polio cases in Afghanistan this year, all but two in the south of the country. That’s up from six cases in 2023.

 

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Nightly Number

Nearly 11 hours

The amount of time that Ryan Routh, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, may have been lying in wait for former President Donald Trump, according to a new federal criminal complaint filed today.

RADAR SWEEP

SWIPE RIGHT — For many people, dating is at least in part about sharing some of the same hobbies and taste. For years, dating apps have tried to incorporate this into their algorithms, having people answer questions about what they’re interested in so that they can make better matches. But now, some people are skipping that step and going straight to the source. The hottest new dating apps aren’t made for dating at all, but are so-called hobby apps, built around an activity like Strava (for running, biking, etc.), Goodreads (logging and rating the books you’ve read) or Letterboxd (the same but for movies). People are increasingly looking to these sources in order to network — for romantic purposes and otherwise. Chris Stokel-Walker reports on the trend for The Observer.

Parting Image

On this date in 2007: O.J. Simpson is arrested in the alleged armed robbery of sports memorabilia collectors in Las Vegas. Simpson was later convicted and sentenced to 9-33 years in prison; he was released in 2017.

On this date in 2007: O.J. Simpson is arrested in the alleged armed robbery of sports memorabilia collectors in Las Vegas. Simpson was later convicted and sentenced to 9-33 years in prison; he was released in 2017. | John Locher/AP

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