The TikTok Electorate

When you rely too much on the idea that propaganda works homogeneously and omni-directionally, it’s very easy to misdiagnose the problem. Is Andrew Tate really turning innocent, smooth-brained young morons into misogynists all on his own? It seems much more likely that some young men bring a set of misogynist assumptions and masculinist entitlement

... See more

I think a lot of people my age and older have--consciously or not--imagined Trump’s success in 2016 as the commencement of a kind of brief chaotic period through which we merely need to survive, until a new period of stability can commence. This is the logic behind billing every election as “the most important of our lives”: We just need to beat Tr

... See more

It’s absolutely true that the tone and content of the videos people consume on TikTok or Instagram affect their understanding of the world around them--but so too do their non-phone experiences, their relationships, their jobs, their mental states, their social worlds, their spending habits, etc. Why do doomers and reactionaries so thoroughly domin

... See more

I don’t think that Trump won “because of” TikTok in any new sense beyond the now-obvious fact that social media is a necessary condition to his success. But I suspect that social media, as it transforms and matures, shapes voters in ways it will take a long time to pick up on. Who is the “TikTok electorate”? How do its users relate to the world, an

... See more

TikTok, like all social media, is a similarly volatile space. Your FYP algorithm is supersensitive; “vibes” are constantly “shifting” for occult and obscure reasons; everything is temporary; and your chief means of expressing preference is to either click or keep scrolling. For this reason I suspect that the experience of electoral volatility is bo

... See more