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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