The TikTok electorate

Young men, social media, and the TikTok subject

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is about how TikTok shapes (and will shape) politics.

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Eight years ago, on the day after Trump’s first election victory, I wrote a piece for my then-employers at New York magazine called “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook.” The piece spotlighted the “fake news” that was circulating on the platform, but also argued that even more important to Trump’s victory than “misinformation” were the new kinds of political communication and coalition-building opened up by the rise of social media, and the concomitant decline of mediating 20th-century institutions like political parties and mainstream newsmedia.

I stand by that argument, but I’ll admit that the viral success of the piece was largely driven by the first half of the column, and especially by the over-egged headline, which stated bluntly a belief held by millions of Democrats. (“The Existence of Facebook Was a Necessary, Though Not Necessarily Sufficient, Condition of Donald Trump’s Election” would have been more accurate, but probably not as successful.) People were desperate for something to blame, and Facebook was a particularly appealing target. It was also, to be clear, a fair one: It was absolutely true that Trump won “because of” Facebook, though not because of “fake news” nor really in any sense that might provide particularly easy or straightforward answers or solutions.

Having been through this once already, I suspect a lot of similar pieces and headlines will be written for this election--this time about TikTok, which has become a particular blame-sink for frustrated Democrats this year. (To some extent it’s being used as a metonym for social media in general, to some extent being singled out as particularly evil.) The particular concerns around TikTok focus on younger--and, especially, male--voters, who, the general argument goes, have been pushed young voters to the right through some combination of misinformation and propaganda. This broad complaint is most familiar in two specific forms: (1) doom-and-gloom TikTok videos have convinced people that the U.S. economy is terrible, even though it’s not, and caused a “vibescession”; and (2) TikTok is radicalizing young men thanks to its endless supply of Andrew Tate, manosphere podcast clips, and street-interview guys asking women what their “body count” is.(Here’s Hasan Piker making a version of tha argument.)

Personally, I can be sympathetic to both of these points, but my sense is that both run the risk of repeating the same kinds of analytic mistakes that ended with too many people mis-attributing Trump’s first victory to “fake news.” If the problem for the broad liberal-left coalition in this country is simply TikTok “infowar,” then surely all “Democrats” or “the left” need to do is recruit and cultivate their own influencers and streamers, and spin up their own podcast-clip slop operations. (And indeed, you’re already seeing a lot of people suggest this on Twitter.)

I’m skeptical that the solution is that straightforward. We should be wary of “hypodermic needle” models of media consumption that invoke a passive, unthinking audience, easily convinced by whatever bullshit they’re uncritically consuming. Consider our recent historical examples of counterprogramming: Was “Air America” a resounding success for the left? Has “MSNBC” been net good for the Democratic Party? Why would we expect greater success from the equivalent type of streamer or YouTuber? This propagandistic schema seems particularly ill-served for social media, where “consumption” is only one of many different ways that people relate to the media they’re served by a decentralized and algorithmic “feed.”

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 dominate the feeds of young men? Is it something about the specific form of the TikTok feed? Is it billionaire astroturfing? Is it that videos like this are what that audience wants, for reasons largely external to TikTok?

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 entitlements to TikTok and YouTube, and have those self-flattering ideas reinforced and strengthened into hardened beliefs. (No YouTuber or opinion columnist ever went out of business from telling an audience exactly what they want to hear.) This isn’t to dismiss some portion of young men as unreachable misogynists--just to suggest that the “outreach” probably has to come well before they encounter TikTok, rather than as well-funded competition against the kind of macho-asshole identity politics espoused by the Andrew Tates of the world.

(At the risk of over-taxonomizing here I think it’s also worth noting an important distinction between the vicious misogynists of the late-period manosphere and the more passive misogynists of the Zynternet and adjacent groups. While there may be some overlap in audience, the former are committed ideologues who are never going to vote for left-wing or even liberal candidates, while the latter are an annoying but probably persuadable bloc of frat-boy types that Democrats are going to need to make their peace with. The rest of this newsletter is really about them.)

At the same time, you don’t want to let TikTok off the hook. One exercise that I think would be useful for understanding the effect of TikTok on the electorate would be to step back and think less about the type of content that you see there and think more about the type of person that TikTok shapes its users into being. 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, and how does that shape their politics?

Again, I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, or even something I’d a working theory. But, in the spirit of working out some shit in a blog post, some ideas to develop:

TikTokers as small-business owners

The first one is unfortunately partly inspired by “P’nut the squirrel.” A few days before the election, a pet squirrel named “P’nut” was seized by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation and euthanized to test for rabies after biting an employee. P’nut was, to some extent, an influencer in his own right, but from what I can tell the main function of his videos was to entice viewers to the OnlyFans page of his owner, Mark Longo, whose dickprint is displayed prominently in most videos of the squirrel.

Thanks to Longo’s tireless campaigning on social media, P’Nut became an online-reactionary cause celebre, with Elon Musk leading the charge, tweeting awful, kitschy A.I.-generated squirrel memes. J.D. Vance even mentioned P’nut in a stump speech. I initially mistook this for a kind of misguided attempt at manufacturing a rural-life-versus-nanny-state culture war issue--Real Americans keep squirrels as pets and the city slickers don’t understand this!--until I noticed that the replies to tweets about P’Nut were much more focused on the idea that the government was interfering with Longo’s livelihood by seizing P’Nut. In other words, they saw Longo as a small-business owner, P’Nut as a kind of … capital good, I suppose, and the NYDEC as unaccountable bolsheviks.

To be clear, I’m not sure that everyone outraged about P’Nut was viewing the situation through the same lens, but the episode was a good reminder that (1) influencers are, at bottom, small-business owners, and (2) small-business owners love Trump. He’s going to lower your taxes and limit the worker and consumer protections that hold you back (a genuine concern for medium-sized streamers and influencers!). If you’re a TikToker or a YouTuber you may even have a vested financial interest in the “anti-woke” culture-war aspects of a Trump presidency, which help protect you from content moderation and de-monetization.

Americans tend to love “small-business owners” as a concept, but as a class they’re among the traditional strongholds for fascist and reactionary politics: fearful of change from below (getting canceled by your followers), jealous of their relative social position (follower count), resentful of the larger and wealthier companies and people they see as threatening their livelihoods (real celebrities), eager to vote for a strong leader whose dictatorial authority they can identify with (fellow influencer Donald J. Trump). The petite bourgeoisie are uniquely exposed to market forces in a way that is not crazy to analogize to an influencer’s exposure to a given platform; it seems worth noting, too, in the age of trad-influencer mania, that Wilhelm Reich famously located the core of petite bourgeois reaction in the structure of the patriarchal family, which both mirrors and is coterminous with the small business itself.

Obviously, not everyone who uses TikTok is making money from it, or is exploiting the labor of their family, and not every influencer is thinking about their interests quite so nakedly. But social media overall tends to encourage users to understand themselves as small-business owners, where the business is “you,” or your brand, navigating the “market” of a platform. This has always been the case, implicitly, but the rise of TikTok and YouTube, which disconnect users from the limiting “social graph” of IRL friends and families, and which pay users directly for developing a successful small business, has made the connection much more explicit. I wonder how much using (and mediating the world with) a set of platforms that inculcate you as a member of the petite bourgeoisie affects how you conceive of your political and material interests?

TikTok and volatility

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 Trump one more time and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Of course, right now, this week, it feels like the shoe is on the other foot: Biden was the interregnum, and Trump the new normal.

But Trump has a pretty unwieldy voting coalition and a bad track record for governance; I would be wary of any theory that suggests we’ve reached some kind of permanent new electoral map or political settlement. It feels a lot more like the actual “new normal” is (and, indeed, has been for a while) permanent electoral volatility, with Democrats and Republicans trading sizable swings from one cycle to the next, incumbency no longer a particular advantage, and neither party really able to establish an enduring coalition to carry them to hegemony.

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 both more familiar to and less uncomfortable for people who spend a lot of time on social media.

You can’t blame coalitional instability (or large electoral swings) purely on TikTok, of course. But it seems to me that, by intermediating social and cultural life with a capricious quasi-market structure from which participants can sometimes wildly benefit, TikTok and other social platforms cultivate an appetite for volatility and risk, which can easily be seen in the rise of legal or semi-legal gambling (on sports and politics), retail investing, and crypto speculation, as well as outsider and anti-establishment political candidates, various kinds of fringe politics, and the “it’s so over/we’re so back” meme.

The sucker machine

In some sense both of these observations are saying different versions of the same thing: TikTok (and YouTube, and Instagram, etc.) construct their users as speculators--independent, atomized, founder-entrepreneurs, open to the market and eager for chaos and risk, from which they might profit. A person whose orientation toward the world has been shaped by the social-media feed might imagine themselves as a daring, nervy gambler, riding big swings in odds and sentiment to reap financial (and social) rewards. You can see how supporting Trump, both as a voter and as a futures market gambler-speculator, might fit easily into this narrative.

But the thing is, as Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht write in their excellent review of Nate Silver’s new book, not that many gamblers (or speculators) actually profit--but the casino always does:

On the Edge, released last week, is that book, promising a path to riches and glory by treating life like a casino. […] If everyday reasoning looks like betting, then in order to come out on top, you need to spend your life at the casino—and remake the rest of the world in its image. […] Silver insists that viewing all decisions through this lens of gambling is the underappreciated characteristic of Very Successful People. It is true that, as Silver suggests, quantifying everything, and then betting on the outcome, has become a pervasive and powerful technique, at work in fields from finance to culture to sports to politics. But what Silver willfully ignores is that the successful players in this world aren’t the bettors. They are the bookies and casino owners—the house that never loses. […]

Several recent studies have found that online gambling activity by teenagers is increasing, and that their calls to helplines are up; about 2.5 million adults in the U.S. have a gambling addiction, a number that’s been on the rise since the legalization of sports betting in 2018. A set of multibillion-dollar industries, from casinos to crypto exchanges to AI, complete the feedback loop, facilitating a gamified Bayesianism and parasitically feeding off society.

In other words, it’s not “speculators” that TikTok and its peers produce so much as an endless population of suckers, self-regarding dummies making themselves available at any moment for a WallStreetBets pump-and-dump or a crypto scam or a wellness supplement or a moronic parlay bet, their money sliding easily into the pockets of the people running each category’s casino-equivalent. Who would you expect these guys to vote for? You might even add “the Republican Party” to Weatherby and Recht’s list of industries parasitically feeding off the marks developed by TikTok and YouTube. It wouldn’t exactly be new territory for the G.O.P.

So what is there to take away from this? (Besides “feels bad.”) I think social media’s most important effect on voters is not the easy accessibility or smooth distribution of certain kinds of propaganda--a lot of which is meeting a demand as much as if not more than creating one--but that its incentives and structures teach people to be a type of person who is not naturally friendly to social-democratic, let alone democratic socialist, politics. I don’t begrudge anyone who sees a calling in creating their own left-wing versions of right-wing influencers or streamers. But I suspect the real work has to be done off of TikTok.