TikTok and the forgotten American voter
A look at the much-debated platform's surprising role in politics
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Hey there, good people.
So yesterday I headed down to D.C.’s E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse for the first day of U.S. et al v. Google, the long-time-coming antitrust trial. After listening to opening statements and the government’s first witness, my quick take: the U.S. has a real challenge ahead of it in telling a compelling story about why seemingly small-bore decisions about how to run a search engine add up to illegally anti-competitive behavior.
But it’s not impossible, and in the government’s favor is that Judge Amit Mehta, 52, looks especially eager to come across as engaged and with-it. Mehta interrupted the lawyer’s opening statements with salient questions, and made a point of correcting himself when he mixed up a detail on Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
The trial’s slated to go on for ten weeks. I’ll likely pop back in for the more interesting bits.
It just so happened, actually, to be my second day spent in the courthouse in less than a week. I’d been called for federal jury duty on one of the January 6th cases before the court. I went in with a bunch of strikes against me — I’m a journalist, I spent about five years as a congressional staffer, I’m often up on Capitol Hill for reporting, and so on. And while the attorneys eventually nope’d me out of the jury pool, I left the bone-chillingly cold courthouse only after about seven hours. The jurors who did get picked were in for it, but minor grumbling aside, folks stood ready to render service.
That experience was a reminder of the enormous amount of unglamorous work that goes into making democracy function. Jurors aside, you have judges, lawyers, clerks, interns, witnesses, and so on pouring their labors into making the laws of this country actually mean something real. It’s a grind, but somebody’s got to do it.
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At the moment, this newsletter is mostly a chance to share with you some of what I’ve been working on, so let’s get to it.
“Will Politicians Ban Their Best Way of Reaching Young Voters?” — I, only a handful of years Judge Mehta’s junior, don’t pretend to be a TikTok enthusiast. But that made for a really fun reporting challenge. For POLITICO Magazine, I set forth to figure out exactly what role TikTok’s playing in politics right now, coming away having learned a lot about everything from influencer agencies to how Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s staff texts him in the mornings with notes on TikTokable moments.
TikTok offers a younger, diverse audience than many other social platforms, and besides that, represents a chance to achieve what Vickie Segar, founder of Village Marketing, a firm that has worked with the Biden campaign, told me was “community with strangers.” TikTok’s much-celebrated algorithm allows creators to break out of their follower bubble, as long as they’re interesting — a standard that can be difficult to reach in politics. But the reward is that offers a way of connecting with would-be voters who are often otherwise overlooked.
There are, of course, lots of concerns about, and reporting on, how vulnerable TikTok is to the influence and pressures of the Chinese government. Think of this piece as a sideways look at that debate. If TikTok does end up banned or otherwise throttled, what would that mean for politics? I hope you might give it a read.
David Cicilline exit interview — Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline recently resigned from Congress, having succeeded in advancing a package of antitrust bills farther than many observers thought he and his allies could get them but having mostly failed to actually turn them into law. What was particularly interesting to me is Cicilline’s diagnosis of how the U.S. tech industry tried to destabilize his working partnership with Colorado Republican Ken Buck: “[I]f they had separated us and made it a partisan issue, we were done.”
Cicilline’s now back home in Rhode Island and Buck’s been booted from the top Republican spot on the House antitrust committee by his party’s leadership. But that strategic interplay between Silicon Valley and Washington remains fascinating, and key. That POLITICO Magazine Q&A is here.
“Jennifer Pahlka Hasn’t Given Up on Fixing the Government” — I sometimes joke that my time spent working on Capitol Hill back in the day made me a better human and worse reporter.
It’s difficult not to come away from that work understanding that people in government are often trying very hard to solve problems that despite their best efforts remain enormously complicated. In many cases, systems have accumulated over the years that almost pre-ordain certain outcomes.
Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America, is out with a new book called “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” about the work of fixing those systems.
I’ve written about Pahlka in the past, with a focus on her efforts to inject more technological talent into government. But her book argues for something a bit new: that “recoding America” depends a great deal on convincing those already in government that they have more power than they think — and that they need to start using it. I profiled Pahlka circa 2023 for The Information. (Note: that piece is paywalled.)
“Lina vs. the Dark Arts: The FTC Wants Big Tech to Know It’s Watching” — In press release after press release, tweet after tweet, Federal Trade Commission leadership — all the way up to Chair Lina Khan — has of late been talking about “dark patterns.” What gives? I investigated for The Information. (Note: that’s also paywalled.)
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Things I’ve got my eye on: Both Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren are arguing that, in hosting today’s big AI ‘summit’ behind closed doors, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is falling for the tech industry’s old games; Sasha Issenberg goes deep on a Ron DeSantis-tied Super PAC’s texting experiments; tweets with links to vintage news tend not to travel very far, and yet Elon Musk’s post last week on a 2021 POLITICO Magazine story of mine of Facebook boycotts got nearly 37 million views; Musk’s behavior — including implying, via that story, that Facebook “caved” to civil-society groups like the Anti-Defamation League — has Micah Sifry quitting Twitter/X and calling out those (including me!) who haven’t yet; GW professor Dave Karpf, who told me back in November "I will be one of the last people to leave Twitter,” is done with it, too; and the Brussels Effect comes for the lightning cable.
Thanks, as always, for reading,
Nancy