Missing the TikTok for the Twitter
The next Trump may well come from the 'fringes' of the Internet where journalists aren't looking.
Hi, all, and welcome to Slow Build, a newsletter on doing tech right, whatever that might mean. If you’re not subscribed yet, feel free to do so here.
Spend any time in just about any newsroom in the last four years and you’ll have discovered journalists terrified by the idea that we missed all the signs pointing to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, and that we aren’t all that well-positioned to catch that sort of thing again. There’s a signal coming out of the political organizing world worth paying attention to, especially for journalists still obsessed with our native mediums of Twitter and Facebook. The thing is, those aren’t the places that young people especially are increasingly spending their time. And the risk is that ignoring that development is bad for journalism, because we can ill afford to mess up again, and back for the country, because the risk is that at least half the country is likely to believe that a candidate they’d never heard of is somehow getting traction because of nefarious business or even election tampering, rather than that they simply bubbled up on TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram while they — or the press — weren’t paying attention.
Here’s that signal. Ben Wessel, who until recently was the executive director of NextGen America, tweeted this from the perspective of those trying to turn out young voters:
I asked Wessel, who’s also put in time doing campaign work for Barack Obama and Cory Booker, to say more, and he explained that, as he sees it, part of this is organizers learning to evolve their content strategy. We’re past the days when consultants would just clip down TV ads into digital videos, said Wessel, but we’re still not at the point where campaigns and advocates are adept at working with the unique nature of each digital medium. “We gotta get to a platform-specific content strategy,” wrote Wessel. And that strategy, he argued, is often going to be less the what than about building relationships, often via proxies who are already doing well on those platforms.
Twitter is “a place to try to work the press and elite tastemakers into thinking you're smart.”
None of which is to say that ‘old-school’ social media platforms are useless. Not even he thinks that, wrote Wessel. The idea instead is that we’re misunderstanding what it is they’re good for, and as journalists, we’re attributing to them powers they don’t have. “I'm not one of the people who think that there's too much focus on Twitter — but there's too much thought that Twitter is a voter contact medium…it’s not,” wrote Wessel. “It's a place to try to work the press and elite tastemakers into thinking you're smart...which is really just a fundraising strategy at the end of the day." You can see some of this how the anti-Trump Lincoln Project sucked up so much oxygen — and about $87 million — in 2020 by being very good at Twitter. Twitter is part of the journalist’s work flow. Tik Tok, unless you’re this guy, isn’t. And to hijack an idea going around from economist Daniel Kahneman and others, Twitter is journalists’ “noise,” biasing us towards what’s happening there.
But especially in elections where youth voting matters, it’s critical to pay attention to where the youts are gathered, and how exactly they’re communicating. (In 2020, young voters mattered a great deal. Per analysis from Tufts, half of Americans 18-29 voted in 2020, — up 11 percentage points from four years earlier, which is not nothing.) This isn’t about scouring the corners of Gab or whatever social network of the minute we like to write about is. To a large segment of the population, we’re talking about social networks that already are the mainstream. According to the Pew Research Center, some 48% of Americans ages 18-29 say they use TikTok. That drops to 22% for people 30-49, and 14% for people 50 to 64 (and frankly I suspect some of us in those older brackets are lying or at least forgetting in our old age how often we’re actually opening the app on our phones).
On the campaign side of things, the idea sometimes get perverted to imply that TikTok is the silver bullet for people looking to get elected. In Georgia’s special election in January, Jon Ossoff used TikTok well in a bid to turn out the young voters who helped make Joe Biden president. He’s now Senator Ossoff. But just being good on the TikTok — and really, does this even need to be said? — isn’t a free pass to a lifetime sinecure in elected office. The Minnesota state senate’s king of TikTok, Matt Little, is no longer serving in the Minnesota state senate. Instead, the idea is something different. It’s that there’s a decent chance that the kind of Trump-like figure who, no matter the ideology, comes from outside politics and surprises people on his or her way into power are likely going to use platforms that are right now outside the mainstream of the mainstream.
Some useful reading on this front comes from a new profile in the L.A. Times of the president of El Salvador:
A few days after he led a coup, the president of El Salvador uploaded a video onto TikTok of him gliding in a military vehicle while hundreds of soldiers salute.
Then comes the soundtrack: A booming reggaeton song called “Bichota"— slang for “big shot.”
The video — irreverent, rooted in pop culture and projecting brazen strength — has been viewed 2.6 million times and is textbook Nayib Bukele, a former marketing executive who has deftly used social media and unbridled confidence to become, at 39, one of the most popular leaders in the world.
Since he took office two years ago on a pledge to fight gangs, squash corruption and break with the country’s entrenched political parties, Bukele’s approval ratings have hovered around 90%, practically unheard of in politics. That has held steady even as he has veered toward autocracy, attacking the press and civil society and occupying the nation’s Legislative Assembly with troops last year after lawmakers refused to approve an anti-crime spending bill.
My friend Micah Sifry, who writes the Connector newsletter, recently wrote about a the Democratic tech group Higher Ground Labs’ annual report on political tech, and I was struck by this passage from its look back at 2020: “While new platforms” – the report earlier puts TikTok, Twitch, Clubhouse, and Discord in this bucket — “garnered attention, campaigns still relied on established social media sites like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter for Digital messaging. These older platforms will likely continue to serve as the main channels for digital messaging for the foreseeable future. But there is room for innovation… We believe there are more opportunities to try new things on legacy sites.”
No one seems to be advocating ignoring so-called legacy sites. But as Patrick Stevenson, the chief mobilization officer for the Democratic National Committee, recently tweeted, “just about every political organization is utterly overleveraged on Twitter." (Yes, I appreciate the irony of reading this on Twitter.) It’s instead about calibration. And this isn’t about specific platforms, but a way of constantly questioning where politics is happening online. Even our best researchers don’t have a full grasp of that. Here’s a good explanation from Pew of why it largely doesn’t try to make sense of kids and teenagers, which boils down to that “surveying children under 18 is expensive and complicated.” All this is only going to intensify as those folks become voters, and the young people in my life assure me they couldn't care less about about Twitter or Facebook.
We should listen to them, or at least ask them which political figures are getting traction whatever it is they’re spending their time.
Good reading:
Paul Romer was once “Silicon Valley’s favorite economist,” per the New York Times’ Steve Lohr. But that’s done:
Today, Mr. Romer, 65, remains a believer in science and technology as engines of progress. But he has also become a fierce critic of the tech industry’s largest companies, saying that they stifle the flow of new ideas. He has championed new state taxes on the digital ads sold by companies like Facebook and Google, an idea that Maryland adopted this year.
And he is hard on economists, including himself, for long supplying the intellectual cover for hands-off policies and court rulings that have led to what he calls the “collapse of competition” in tech and other industries.
One-time OMB director nominee Neera Tanden’s is now in a new role in the White House, where her mandate includes taking a look at the state of government IT, writes Tyler Pager in the Washington Post:
Her portfolio will include health-care policy and overseeing a review of the U.S. Digital Service, according to a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters… The U.S. Digital Service is responsible for making the government accessible to Americans online.
Anna Louie Sussman writes in the New Yorker about “the promise and perils of the new fertility entrepreneurs”:
[France] Brunel lives in New York, where she runs an innovation-strategy firm while studying to be an Ayurvedic-medicine practitioner. About two years ago, she started seeing ads for Kindbody, the fertility-services franchise, on her Instagram feed…
Finally, some folks on Twitter seem to think I’m pulling their leg with this. I don’t joke about words, people.
