8.4 C
New York
Thursday, March 28, 2024

The TikTok Teens Trying to Meme the Vote

Colton Hess knows TikTok’s power to reach young people en masse. Once, he got half a million views just for opening a banana on camera. So when he noticed in the months leading up to the election that youth voter organizations weren’t showing up on the platform, he realized there was an underserved population he might be able to help. “I don’t have much experience in voter registration, or activism at all,” he says, but “I know how to use TikTok. I understand this world of memes and trends and sounds.” He decided to put his skills to use.

>

In July, Hess quit his job as an Amazon product manager to start Tok the Vote, a TikTok voter mobilization campaign. Its goal was, and is, to make youth voting go viral. Plenty of political content already exists on the platform—groups like the Conservative Hype House (1.5 million followers) have turned the viewpoints of right-wing Gen Zers into a meme machine—but when Hess was pulling his org together, there wasn’t much circulating about the more basic details of life in the electorate, like how to register or cast a ballot for the first time. So the 25-year-old, who has the vibe of a student body president and a natural affinity for organizing people, started recruiting. He lured in most of Tok the Vote’s creators via DM. The pitch was simple: If we create the content and coordinate our efforts, we can make a difference in the 2020 election.

Get-out-the-vote efforts have used technology to reach young people for as long as tech has existed. This year, the platforms themselves rolled out a range of resources to reach young people on their phones. (TikTok has its own in-app voter guide.) That’s nice, but according to Ioana Literat, who studies online youth civic participation at Columbia University, the impact is much greater when the information comes from other young people. “When it comes to voting, youth care most about what their peers think,” she says. If grassroots campaigns are looking to explain the merits of civic engagement and aren’t spreading the message through other teens and twentysomethings, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity. “In order to reach young voters, we need to talk to them in their preferred language, on their turf,” Literat says. “Their turf right now, including when it comes to politics and voting, is TikTok.”

Last week, over Zoom, a few dozen of Tok the Vote’s creators gathered to plan their next campaign. The scheme, as laid out by Saad Amer, the 26-year-old founder of Plus1Vote, a youth-focused voting organization that partnered with Tok the Vote to organize the call, would be to have everyone make videos to the same sound—a mashup of Missy Elliott’s track “WTF” and Michelle Obama’s voice saying “vote.” The hope was that the star power of those two women, combined with the influence of the folks on the call, would hijack TikTok’s algorithm and turn their campaign into a viral trend. Amer surveyed the Zoom gallery and then paused to address everyone. “Spaces like this are actually really rare, where it is all young people,” he said. “We’ve got LGBTQ representation, we've got all the colors, people from different states across America, all coming together to do something creative from our own perspective and push that out there. Let's just take a second to acknowledge how special and profound that is.” The people in the grid broke out in silent snaps and head nods.

As the call progressed, creators traded ideas about how to riff on “WTF.” Lauren Ferree (103,000 followers) demonstrated how she would paint the letters V-O-T-E on her face, in the style of a TikTok makeup tutorial. “I kind of want to do a play off of Missy Elliott’s lyrics,” said Ben Abiola (478,000 followers). “Like, going to these mailing drop-off boxes where people are voting early and encouraging people, like the song says, to ‘show us how you do it where you’re from.’” Elise Joshi (42,000 followers) went for the scared straight approach; she would bombard people with statistics, using text on screen, to remind people about the issues at stake in this election.

Joshi started making videos on TikTok a few months ago. She’d planned to spend her first semester at UC Berkeley registering students to vote on campus, but when remote learning kept her quarantining with her parents in Mountain View this fall, she started standing on street corners and holding up signs about voter registration for passing cars. Then Covid-19 cases surged in her area, and even that started to feel risky. So she came home, downloaded TikTok, and started making videos.

Joshi’s videos cover climate change (“it’s my top issue”), racial equality (she’s half-Indian, like Senator Kamala Harris), and the wealth gap (the $750 President Trump reportedly paid in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017 wouldn’t cover a month of her college tuition). But mostly, she talks about why it’s important to vote this November. Never mind that Joshi herself has never voted before. She’s 18 now, and she’s not throwing away her ballot. “The fact that it’s my first time feels really cool,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, Trump? I’ve been waiting four years for this.’”

TikTok content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Many of the places to register first-time voters—like college campuses—are closed this fall due to the coronavirus. That’s put more pressure on digital tools to do the same work. “Voter registration, outreach, and recruitment are all totally different this year,” says Abby Kiesa, the director of impact at Tufts' Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or Circle. Platforms like TikTok have at least partially filled the gap. In a recent poll of young people, Circle found that 29 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds have heard about the election on TikTok. “Young people are using the tools that they think are going to have an impact,” says Kiesa. “As a result of that, some young people are definitely voting.”

Earlier in the summer, Hess asked Tok the Vote’s creators to make videos encouraging people to register, just to see if such a strategy could work. In one weekend, Hess says the campaign led at least 3,500 people to get registered or request a mail-in ballot. (That’s based on the number of people who used links directly from Tok the Vote’s videos. More may have registered separately, after seeing those videos.) “Now that people are registered,” Hess says, “we need to get them out voting.”

>

Historically, turnout among young voters is low—fewer than half of Americans aged 18 to 29 voted in the 2016 election. And while Gen Z seems to have an appetite for social issues, it’s not clear how much the energy that’s led them to protest things like gun violence, climate change, and racial injustice will translate to the polls. Kristian Lundberg, who researches youth political behavior at Circle, says there’s evidence to believe that it will. In 2018, the group found that participating in online activism was a key contributor to young people showing up at the ballot box—in part because youth-led groups like March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement “emphasized voting as a lever for change.” This year, Lundberg points out that plenty of young people have already voted with mail-in ballots, at a rate that’s already “exponentially greater than what we saw in 2016.”

Youth-led TikTok groups pick up where those other youth-led movements left off. Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who is 16, took a leave of absence from school to start TikTok for Biden, which now includes about 360 creators. Between them, the group’s creators have more than 160 million followers—a sum greater than the total number of Americans who voted in the 2016 election. Pro-Trump teens have also found a home on TikTok, where the president’s soundbites are easily turned into memes. Aubrey Moore, the 17-year-old creator of TikTok’s Republican Hype House, for example, has amassed a powerful coalition with nearly 1 million followers.

Each of those groups has gained a following because of its creators’ abilities to make engaging in politics seem fun—like taking a clip of Trump dancing at a rally in Florida, overlaying it with a mashup of Coldplay and Savage, and turning it into a viral duet. “Creativity is an underused yet crucial channel for civic education, and TikTok is the best example in this sense,” says Literat. “Personally I am blown away by the creativity of TikTok users who are using songs, memes, dances, and skits to talk about voting. I know this sounds a bit hyperbolic or cheesy, but this is the future of civic education.”

TikTok content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

That’s also made TikTok an amplifier of misinformation. There are so few barriers to going viral that distorted facts sometimes reach millions of people. “To protect my own sanity, I stay away from the For You page,” says Quentin Jiles, a political creator with 116,000 followers. Jiles joined TikTok last fall to share his take on the political news of the day (his brand: “Your political BFF”). He’s used every feature in the TikTok arsenal to get people involved in the conversation. Recently, he tried using the platform’s duet feature to get people talking about their early voting experiences, turning voting into a gamified challenge. But Jiles worries about how other creators can gamify disinformation. TikTok banned content related to QAnon last week, but before that the conspiracy was being shared widely, often among young people. And the same kind of coordination that groups like Tok the Vote are using to encourage more people to vote could easily be used for other means, like organizing voter intimidation efforts.

For now, though, TikTok might be the best tool anyone has for reaching young voters as the election draws nearer. On Sunday, Tok the Vote’s creators each posted their videos with the Missy Elliott sound, encouraging their peers to fill out their ballots and vote early. The campaign’s best performing one came from 23-year-old Sam McGraw, who pantomimed the experience of being too young to head to the polls. She walks off-screen and returns to the frame a little older, wearing a Biden-Harris T-shirt, under a banner of text: “It’s finally my time to vote.”

TikTok content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Related Articles

Latest Articles