#126: Reclaim TikTok
Flooding the comment sections with good vibes
Hello,
you are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus, i work as researcher and communication advisor for media organisations and political parties. Today we talk about:
✊ #ReclaimTikTok
🇺🇸 Ban TikTok
📣 TikTok for political communication
✊ #ReclaimTikTok
After extensive media coverage concerning the scary dominance of Germany’s right-wing extremist party AfD (#123) several attempts of countermovements (Spiegel) can be observed in the German part of TikTok.
Since the beginning of March a group of german climate activists including Luisa Neubauer (29.8K Follower 136.6.K Likes) – one of the main organisers of the school strike for climate movement in Germany – is promoting the hashtag #reclaimTikTok asking fellow activists to join the platform in order “not to let the AfD's lies & disinformation go unchallenged.” Creators post instructions on how to support “progressive accounts” and ask new users to “flood the comment sections with good vibes”.
In the last two weeks there have been over 2200 posts including the #ReclaimTikTok with up to 520K individual views. Some new TikTok users share their malaise having to perform in front of a camera on a platform they never wanted to join while others already start questioning the deeper meaning of the hashtag and ask for further political considerations besides mere opposition against far-right content.
The German far-right has noticed the counter-movement early and is asking followers to hijack the hashtag. Martin Sellner, an Austrian far-right political activist, and leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria has done so in his Telegram group. AfD member of the state parliament Baden-Wuerttemberg Miguel Klauß (277.5K Followers 3M Likes) has used #ReclaimTikTok in several of his videos. It remains to be seen if the original #ReclaimTikTok will further win momentum before several German elections on municipal and federal level.
🇺🇸 Ban TikTok
On Wednesday, March 13 the House of Representatives passed a bill that will force TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the app to a US company within six months or risk a country-wide ban (Guardian). While this might be the most existential threat in the USA for Byte Dance yet, a sudden sale or ban remains unlikely. Here are some points for discussion:
With an election around the corner, it’s very possible that the Senate – where the bill will be discussed now – wouldn’t have the appetite for going after TikTok (Techcrunch).
Prior attempts in the U.S. to ban TikTok have so far failed on First Amendment grounds and because courts found legal challenges have presented only hypothetical national security risks instead of actual evidence TikTok has shared any data with Chinese authorities (Variety).
“Given that we're contemplating one of the largest forced divestments in US history OR the largest removal of speech in US history, you gotta provide more evidence than mere possibility” tweets Paul Matzko – Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.
By the way: the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that Americans have the right to receive what the government deems to be foreign propaganda. The Court essentially said that the American people need to be free to evaluate these transgressive ideas for themselves (Time)
And here is “a gentle reminder that US tech lobbyists for corporations that do more to harm US teens are behind this push to ban tiktok. Their hope is that it’ll force young Americans to go back to Instagram and YouTube for their entertainment. Its time to regulate the whole industry.” tweets Joan Donovan – Founder the Critical Internet Studies Institute and BU Asst Professor of Journalism.
Oh, and “a ban is unlikely to achieve the intended effect of meaningfully curbing China’s ability to gather sensitive data on Americans or to conduct influence operations that harm US interests.” (Atlantic Council)
And: “I am tired of reading analysis of TikTok from people who have not spent any significant amount of time learning how to use it or trying to figure out how it works. I think it's possible to make many arguments about TikTok being harmful without doing this strained reaching” tweets Jared Holt – senior researcher of US hate and extremist movements at @ISDglobal. I could not agree more.
📣 TikTok for political communication
After one month Joe Biden’s re-electing TikTok account has garnered 233.2K followers and 2.6M likes, tweets Lauren Kapp aka poli sci princess (21K Followers 1.6M Likes) who is “tiktoking for for @BidenHQ and @thedemocrats (527.9K Followers 13.6M Likes).
Kapp is talking about job opportunities here. Not sure what the Biden social team makes of their boss wanting to ban and use TikTok at the exact same time but the meme-infused Dark Brandon narrative (#124) seems to work quite okay: get over it lol.
Political cultures around the globe are very different, yet embracing memes – as the lingua franca of the internet – and tapping into concepts like meta-cringe for attention hijacking seem to become more common. The Austrian health minister Johannes Rauch got mixed feedback for rhyming a vaccination recommendation in some sort of teenage slang addressing his audience with the remarkable sentence: "Hello my mice, it's me, the health minister of your dreams"
In coming newsletters i plan to dive deeper into that and present some best and worst cases plus further analysis on how to get it right. Would you like to read something like that?
What else?
Instagram has overtaken TikTok in app downloads (FT). 🤷 A healthy strategy should include a variety of platforms anyhow. We will forever have #TikTokNostalgia like this one over on X.
The TikTok account onlocklearning let’s deepfaked celebs explain formulas and geometry
Economic modelling suggests that SMB activity on TikTok contributed $24.2bn to GDP in the US in 2023, while supporting 224,000 jobs (Oxford Economics)
Special issue: Methods in Visual Politics and Protest: Mixed Methods, Data Curation & Anti-Publics is out. A lot of TikTok-related research here.
Gen Z is officially old enough to feel old (Vox). Whatever.
C'est ça . Thanks for reading. If you want to discuss TikTok, need help with your strategy on the platform or want me to evaluate your account just let me know.
Perhaps a naive question: what's with this Chinese scare?
I understand that we live in the privacy-loving shadow of the NSA scandal, but reading the content of emails hush-hush (or even just the metadata, whatever it was) is one thing, and running servers for these short videos is another. Even if the Chinese government took hold of those, what sort of even theoretical exploitation would they be able to pull off?
What potential national security risk or ‘sensitive data’ are at stake?