A seven-second TikTok video posted this month on the official Kamala Harris account shows Donald Trump mistakenly telling a crowd to get out and vote on January 5.
“Bro is running for president and doesn’t even know when Election Day is,” reads the caption, alongside a laughing emoji.
While the 2016 race for the White House was labelled the “Facebook election” as campaigns and voters flocked to the social media platform, this year TikTok is the app of choice for Harris and Trump’s online battle for younger voters.
“This election has been the TikTok election,” said Lara Cohen, head of creators at Linktree, which has worked on get-out-the-vote initiatives. The campaigns are “conscious that [Gen Z] is a demographic that they need to be hitting if they’re going to win — and that starts with generating enthusiasm online”.
The campaigns have been harnessing irreverent internet culture, memes and slang on TikTok, as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has deliberately shifted its algorithm away from serving political content on Facebook and Elon Musk’s pro-Trump bent has alienated some users of his platform, X.
TikTok’s algorithm — which feeds users an addictive stream of popular short videos — allows campaigns to get in front of new audiences who might not otherwise be searching for political content.
“The design of the app allows opposing filter bubbles to interact,” said Crystal Abidin, professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth. “It allows you to find things outside your palette.”