U.S. Election: Turning Off TikTok Is a Big Risk for the Democrats
The Biden campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-aligned groups have spent millions of dollars courting influencers who appear on TikTok and other social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Recently, the White House even hosted a star-studded gala for hundreds of would-be digital leaders.
Beyond Biden, many of the Democratic party’s most visible rising stars – such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has more than 900,000 followers on TikTok – use the app to communicate with their constitutents and fans. Similarly, US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has made a name for himself on TikTok for his viral take-down videos of Fox News hosts.
Data from non-partisan organisation Pew Research shows that the number of voters aged 18-29 who get their news from TikTok has jumped to 32%, a more than threefold increase since the 2020 election. Additionally, a poll by NBC found that young TikTok users skew Democrat over Republican by a margin of 47% to 30%.
Trump Makes a U-turn
Biden’s position on TikTok has not gone unremarked on by his rival, who’s tried to exploit the controversy for political gain. In 2020, Trump proposed an executive order to outlaw the app in the US, which was rejected by a federal judge. But now the former president is embracing it.
According to reports, that could be partially due the lobbying efforts of influential Republican donor Jeff Yass, whose investment firm owns an estimated 15% of ByteDance. Yet it’s also likely to be due to Trump perceiving an opportunity to peel off young voters from Democrats.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump declared in a recent interview. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
Even if Democrats have been more aggressive in leveraging TikTok, Republicans have made inroads in countering this appeal. This includes Trump cosying up to Libs of TikTok and the Babylon Bee, two popular pro-Trump social media influencers.
Election Timing
A potential forced divestment of TikTok could land right in the heat of the 2024 election season. If Biden were to sign the legislation, ByteDance would be granted six months to identify a purchaser. A ban could be put in place as early as October of this year, with the election slated for November 5.
Democrats may be calculating that the odds of a sale not going through are low. For example, former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has already announced that he’s convening an investor group prepared to buy TikTok if it goes on the market.
Still, the mere act of putting at risk a platform that millions of young voters use for hours of every day can only have political downsides.
The closure of TikTok would boost demand for other social media platforms, as users search for substitutes. Trump, for example, has lamented that banning TikTok would “make Facebook bigger”.
This would force Democrats to rethink their strategies, to build new followings, and to repackage their messaging for alternative apps. Yet divergent demographics of user bases would ensure that it wouldn’t be a perfect, one-to-one transition.
For instance, according to the research firm Insider Intelligence, roughly a quarter of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 to 34. On TikTok it’s almost half.
Biden may well perceive that the national security threats posed by TikTok are too steep a price to accept its continuation as it is. But whether he will push ahead with closing down TikTok ahead of November is – like the election result – hard to call.
Thomas Gift is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre on US Politics, UCL. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
