Some Democrats worry crackdown on TikTok could hurt party

More than three dozen members of Congress have TikTok accounts, almost all of them Democrats. The White House briefs TikTok influencers as if they’re members of the press. And the most popular lawmaker on TikTok, Democratic Rep. Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, has racked up a following of 1.6 million by posting regular videos about the top news.

Democrats have so successfully cultivated TikTok clout and the soapbox it provides for young voters - in contrast to Republicans’ far less enthusiastic embrace - that party operatives are now drawing up detailed plans to dramatically expand its use in the 2024 campaign.

But that strategy is colliding head-on with the Biden administration’s push to crack down on TikTok. Fearing that the app’s Chinese ownership could pose a security threat, the administration, through a powerful interagency committee, is pushing a plan that would require TikTok’s Chinese owners to divest from the popular video app.

“Ditching something that has proven to be incredibly helpful to winning elections is like shooting yourself in the foot,” said Aidan Kohn-Murphy, the 19-year-old founder of Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of creators formerly known as TikTok for Biden.

Kohn-Murphy and Victor Shi, strategy director for Voters of Tomorrow, a group also aimed at Gen Z, said numerous Democratic campaigns have expressed interest in cultivating relationships with creators of TikTok content, building on the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. “For any campaign that wants to get their message out to young people, I don’t think you can do that without TikTok,” Shi said.

That’s where the potential problems come in for Democrats, whose reliance on younger voters has only become greater with the ascendance of politically potent issues like abortion rights, climate change, racial equity and gun control.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes members from various federal agencies, is developing a proposal that would force TikTok’s owners to divest, The Washington Post reported last month. Some believe that would require an act of Congress, but it marks an escalation of the administration’s efforts to address national security concerns about the company’s Beijing-headquartered owner, ByteDance.

TikTok has been in negotiations with the committee for over two years. As the app has surged in popularity during that time, so have policymakers’ worries that it could be exploited to expose Americans’ sensitive data or spread propaganda.

At the same time, Democratic digital strategists say they are increasingly hearing from candidates looking to expand their use of TikTok for the coming campaign by enhancing their own presence on the app as well as forging connections with influencers. In the 2022 midterms, more than 200 state and national candidates had TikTok accounts, including about 1 in 3 Democratic campaigns, according to a D.C.-based think tank.

In Congress, nearly two dozen lawmakers have posted since the start of the year, all Democrats except independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (Fla.), according to a review of active accounts by The Post.

TikTok, which has about 150 million users in the United States, has become a mainstay in many people’s lives. The wildly successful algorithm serves videos to multitudes of people who might not otherwise view them, propelling nobodies to stardom and turning small businesses into profit machines. The app, which attracted more visitors than Google last year, has done much to reshape American culture, especially for younger generations.

That has not escaped the attention of politicians, including Biden’s team. The White House does not have an official account, but it uses influencers to disseminate its messaging through the platform. In parallel with its regular briefings to the Washington-based press corps, the White House has provided information to TikTok creators about war efforts in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic. A group of TikTok personalities visiting in October spent an hour in the Oval Office in a private meeting with the president.

The White House is now signaling its intention to ramp up its reliance on TikTok and other social media as the president heads toward an expected reelection announcement.

Its director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, was recently promoted to a level on par with the White House press secretary, “because the president values our digital operation at a similar level as our traditional communications and press departments,” a White House official said on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

The official, previewing upcoming digital strategies, said the White House will engage with more regional and local content creators, just as it has with local print and broadcast outlets.

The audience on social media platforms - including people who might not subscribe to a newspaper or a cable channel - is considerable compared with network news. Daniel Daks, founder of the talent management firm Palette, who helped organize the influencers’ trip to Washington last fall to meet Biden and former president Barack Obama, represents about 100 creators with a combined following of about 348 million TikTok users - many times over the average combined viewership of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news.

Internal analytics revealed that candidates’ TikTok cameos and meetings with influencers yielded significantly more eyeballs for fewer dollars than television ad buys, Daks said, adding that those influencers are planning for greater political involvement this next campaign cycle.

“Last election, there was still an open question: Could influencers move the needle on political campaigns?” he said. “It’s been answered pretty solidly with a yes.”

What was once a place for lip syncs and dances has become a hub for political and news content, said Lindsay Gorman, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy who studied campaign messaging on TikTok during the midterms, adding that “2024 will be the election where political content really has an impact on TikTok.”

Strategists said they are already having conversations with candidates and campaigns about plans around the app, and Democrats are looking back at past elections to see what has worked to rally Gen Z and millennials.

In 2020, Biden’s campaign sought to distinguish him from Trump on the platform with videos that contrasted their rhetoric on women’s rights and climate change, said a person familiar with the campaign’s digital media strategy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss strategy.

“People were sort of like meh about Biden, so it was fueling the flames of getting people to talk about Biden in a trendable way,” the strategist said.

Now, as the administration faces accusations from Republicans that it is soft on China, Biden aides have privately wished the Chinese company would spin off its U.S. operations. But so far there is no indication that it will do so.

A greater share of Americans, 41 percent, back a TikTok ban, while 25 percent oppose one, mostly out of concerns that the app’s parent company is based in China, a Washington Post poll in March found. But the opposite is true of younger Americans: Among those 18 to 34 years old, 40 percent oppose a nationwide ban on TikTok while 28 percent support one.

That could make a perceived assault on the app even more perilous for Democrats.

“The bigger risk - rather than some dozen congresspeople that are on TikTok no longer having access to the platform - is the message it sends to young voters, [making] Democrats seem even more out of touch with this growing constituency of millennials and Gen Z,” said Democratic pollster Nancy Zdunkewicz.

None of this has prevented lawmakers on both sides of the aisle from attacking the platform, saying it could share American users’ data with China or promote propaganda, assertions that TikTok has denied. In a bipartisan grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew last month by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lawmakers questioned the company’s misinformation control, data sharing, screen-time limits for minors and connections to the Chinese government, which opposes a sale.

The White House has endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give Biden new authority to ban or restrict a wide range of communications and technology products from China, after President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban the app in 2020 failed.

However, a small contingent of Democrats - including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), Robert Garcia (Calif.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) - have protested the notion of a ban, saying it misses the broader problem of data misuse across the tech sector.

Ocasio-Cortez posted her first video after Chew’s testimony, arguing that a nationwide ban would be an unprecedented and ineffective way to solve the broader data-harvesting problem. She has since gained a following of a half-million on the platform.

For some who make a living on TikTok - like V Spehar, host of Under the Desk News, which has 2.9 million followers - the administration’s toughening stance has felt like an about-face, or at least sharply contradictory. Spehar visited the White House and received two letters of thanks from Biden.

“How can that be true, and this is such an incredibly dangerous platform that you have to annihilate it immediately and that’s going to save America?” Spehar said in an interview. “And we’re not looking at extending those protections across all social media platforms, across all banks, across all digital places where you put your digital information. It doesn’t make sense, which causes a lot of frustration.”

But Annie Wu Henry, social media producer for the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), said TikTok is not the only way to mobilize young voters.

“So much of what digital is, it’s just consistently evolving, and we need to evolve with it,” Henry said.

The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz contributed to this report.