Colton Hess is familiar with the ability of TikTok to meet young people en masse. Once, just for opening a banana on tape, he got half a million views. So when he found that youth voter groups were not showing up on the site in the months leading up to the election, he realized that there was an underserved group he might be able to support. I don't have a lot of voter registration experience or advocacy at all," he says, but "I know how to use TikTok. This world of memes and patterns and sounds, I understand. He wanted to use his abilities.
In July, Hess left his job to start Tok the Vote, a TikTok voter mobilization program, as an Amazon product manager. Its goal was, and is, to make voting for young people go viral. There is still a lot of political material on the web, organizations such as the Conservative Hype House (1.5 million supporters) have transformed the views of the right-wing Gen Zers into a meme machine, but when Hess pulled his org together, there was not much circulating about the electorate's more basic life information, such as how to register or cast a vote for the first time. So the 25-year-old, who has the vibe of a president of a student body and a natural talent for coordinating individuals, began recruiting. He lured in most of the creators of Tok the Vote through DM. The pitch was simple: If we create the content and coordinate our efforts, we can make a difference in the 2020 election.
For as long as innovation has existed, Get-out-the-vote campaigns have used technology to target young people. The networks themselves have rolled out a number of tools this year to meet young people on their phones. (TikTok has its own in-app voting guide.) That's cool, but the impact is much greater when the knowledge comes from other young people, according to Ioana Literat, who studies online youth civic engagement at Columbia University. "Young people care most about what their peers think when it comes to voting," she says. If grassroots campaigns aim to illustrate the merits of public participation and do not spread the word through other adolescents and twenty-somethings, they miss a big chance. "We need to talk to them in their preferred language, on their turf, in order to reach young voters," says Literat. "Right now, their turf is TikTok, including when it comes to politics and voting."
Last week, a few dozen developers of Tok the Vote gathered at Zoom to prepare their next campaign. "The system, as set 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 with the same sound, a mashup of the "WTF" track of Missy Elliott and the "vote" voice of Michelle Obama. The hope was that the star power of those two women, combined with the influence of the folks o o the influence of the folks o "vote. The Zoom gallery was surveyed by Amer and then stopped to address others. "In fact, spaces like this are truly rare, where all young people are," he said. We have LGBTQ inclusion, we have all the shades, people from various states across America, all coming together from our own viewpoint to do something creative to push it out there. Let's just take a second to appreciate how unique and profuse it is.
As the call progressed, creators shared ideas on how to riff on "WTF." Lauren Ferree (103,000 followers) revealed, in the style of a TikTok makeup tutorial, how she would paint the letters V-O-T-E on her face. "Ben Abiola said, "I kind of want to make a play of Missy Elliott's lyrics (478,000 followers). Like, going to these mailing drop-off boxes where people vote early and encouraging people, as the song says, to 'show us how you do it where you're from.'" Elise Joshi (42,000 followers) went for the frightened straight approach; she would bombard people with statistics to remind people of the issues at stake in this election, using text on screen."
A few months ago, Joshi started making videos on TikTok. She had intended to spend her first semester at UC Berkeley registering students to vote on campus, but this fall, when remote learning kept her quarantined with her parents in Mountain View, she began standing on street corners and keeping signs for passing cars on voter registration. In her region, Covid-19 cases then surged, and even that began to feel risky. So she went home, downloaded TikTok, and began to make videos.
Joshi's videos address climate change ('it's my top issue'), racial equality (she's half-Indian, like Senator Kamala Harris), and the wealth gap (a month of her college tuition will not be covered by the $750 President Trump reportedly paid in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017). But mostly, she's talking about why voting this November is significant. Never mind that never before did Joshi vote herself. Today, she's 18, and she's not throwing her vote away. "It feels really cool that it's my first time," she says. It's like, 'Trump, hey?' I've been waiting for this for four years."
Because of the coronavirus, many of the locations that register first-time voters, such as college campuses, are closed this fall. That puts more pressure on digital instruments to do the same job. "This year, voter registration, outreach, and recruitment are all completely different," says Abby Kiesa, the impact director at the Center for Knowledge and Analysis on Civic Learning and Participation or Circle at Tufts. The void has at least partially been filled by platforms like TikTok. Circle found in a recent survey of young people that 29 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds have learned about the TikTok election. "Young people use the tools they think are going to have an impact on them," Kiesa says. "Some young people are definitely voting as a result of that."
Hess asked the makers of Tok the Vote earlier in the summer to make videos urging individuals to register, just to see if such a tactic could succeed. Hess says that over one weekend, the initiative led at least 3,500 people to register or request a mail-in vote. "(That's based on the number of people who used links directly from the videos of Tok the Vote. After watching those videos, more may have registered separately.) "Now that people are registered," Hess says, "we need to get them to vote.
Turnout among young voters has traditionally been poor, with less than half of Americans aged 18 to 29 voting in the 2016 election. And while Gen Z seems to have an appetite for social issues, it's not clear how much the passion that has led them to protest the polls would translate into topics like gun violence, climate change, and racial inequality. Kristian Lundberg, who studies the political conduct of youth at Circle, says that there is reason to suggest that it would. In 2018, the organization found that engaging in online activism was a major contributor to young people appearing at the ballot box, in part because "voting as a lever for change" was highlighted by youth-led movements such as March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement. This year, Lundberg points out that many young people have already voted with mail-in ballots, at a pace that is already "exponentially grea grea"
TikTok youth-led organizations pick up where the other youth-led movements have left off. Aidan Kohn-Murphy, 16, took a leave of absence from school to begin Biden's TikTok, which now includes around 360 founders. The founders of the collective have more than 160 million followers amongst them, a figure greater than the total amount of Americans who voted in the 2016 election. Teens from Pro-Trump have also found a home on TikTok, where the soundbites of the president are quickly converted into memes. For instance, Aubrey Moore, the 17-year-old founder of the Republican Hype House of TikTok, has accrued a powerful coalition of almost 1 million supporters.
Because of the ability of its creators to make engaging in politics seem enjoyable, each of those groups has gained a following, such as taking a clip of Trump dancing at a rally in Florida, overlaying it with a mashup of Coldplay and Savage, and making it into a viral duet. "Creativity is an underused yet essential channel for civic education, and in this sense, TikTok is the best example," Literat says. I am personally struck by the ingenuity of users of TikTok who use songs, memes, dances, and skits to talk about voting. It sounds a little hyperbolic or cheesy, I know, but this is the future of civic education.
That made TikTok an amplifier for misinformation as well. To go viral, there are so few hurdles that distorted information often hit millions of individuals. "I stay away from the For You page to protect my own sanity," says Quentin Jiles, a political founder with 116,000 followers. Last fall, Jiles joined TikTok to share his take on the day's political news (his brand: "Your political BFF"). To get people interested in the discussion, he used every feature in the TikTok arsenal. He recently attempted to use the duet function of the app to get individuals to speak about their early voting experiences, turning voting into a gamified competition. But Jiles worries about how misinformation can gamify other makers. Last week, TikTok banned QAnon-related material, but before that, the conspiracy was widely spread, often among young people. And the same form of coordination that organizations such as Tok the Vote use to inspire more citizens to vote could easily be used for other ways, such as organic voting.
For now, however, as the election draws nearer, TikTok may be the best opportunity anyone has to attract young voters. The makers of Tok the Vote each posted their videos with the Missy Elliott sound on Sunday, urging their colleagues to fill out their ballots and vote early. The best performance of the campaign came from 23-year-old Sam McGraw, who pantomimized the feeling of being too young to go to the polls. "She walks off-screen and returns to the frame a bit older, wearing a Biden-Harris T-shirt, under a text banner: "It's my time to vote at last.
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