Achi news desk-
Popular social media platform TikTok is accused of holding US data in China, fostering censorship, and spreading misinformation. Its popularity is puzzling US politicians, but especially the Democrats who have relied heavily on the app to reach their core base of young voters.
Is it “time out” for TikTok in the US? And will the leader of the Democrats himself, President Joe Biden, ultimately decide to close the platform before the 2024 elections?
On March 13 the US House of Representatives voted 352 to 65 to order TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the app (which is believed to have 150 million US users) or face a US ban over his alleged links to the Chinese Communist party.
The bill follows reports that American TikTok executives are already exploring options for a voluntary split with ByteDance in a preemptive move to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
Although the bipartisan bill is not guaranteed to pass the Senate – where Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not committed to bringing it to a floor vote – Biden has said he would sign the proposal if it comes to his desk.
The implications of this goose campaign are great. Many Democrats fear that banning TikTok in the run-up to the election would be a self-inflicted political disaster, especially when it comes to courting young voters.
Read more: Why Biden is investing in influencers to help with this year’s election
One consultant called Democrats “politically insane” for putting TikTok at risk. And the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, speculated that blocking TikTok would lead to the Democrats “literally losing every voter under 35, forever”.
The impact of losing even a few marginal percentage points of votes from the under 35 crowd is significant.
NurPhoto srl / Alamy
Young voters were central in elevating Biden to the White House in 2020. However, some polls show Biden lagging behind former president Donald Trump among gen-Z and young millennials .
Invest in TikTok
In recent months, Democratic party activists have not invested heavily in voter outreach on TikTok, in hopes of increasing the youth vote. Biden’s campaign account, @BidenHQ, has more than 266,000 followers and @thedemocrats has over 529,000.
The extremely young, progressive user base is likely to resent the government for removing their favorite app. A ban could also severely limit the Democratic party’s ability to connect with younger voters through advertising and other forms of engagement.
The Biden campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democratic-aligned groups have spent millions of dollars courting influencers who appear on TikTok and other social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. The White House recently even hosted a star-studded gala for hundreds of aspiring digital leaders.
Beyond Biden, many of the Democratic party’s most visible rising stars — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has more than 900,000 followers on TikTok — use the app to communicate with their constituents and supporters. Similarly, US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg has made a name for himself on TikTok for his viral videos of Fox News hosts.
Data from the non-partisan organization Pew Research shows that the number of 18-29-year-old voters who get their news from TikTok has jumped to 32%, a more than threefold increase since the 2020 election. In addition, an NBC poll found that users young TikTok skews Democrat over Republican by 47% to 30%.
Trump is doing a U-turn
Biden’s position on TikTok has not gone unnoticed by his opponent, who has tried to exploit the controversy for political gain. In 2020, Trump proposed an executive order to ban the app in the US, which was rejected by a federal judge. But now the former president is embracing it.
According to reports, that may be due in part to the lobbying efforts of influential Republican donor Jeff Yass, whose investment firm owns an estimated 15% of ByteDance. Yet it is also likely because Trump sees an opportunity to alienate young voters from the Democrats.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok who love it,” Trump declared in a recent interview. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
Even if Democrats have been more aggressive in leveraging TikTok, Republicans have made progress to counter this appeal. This includes Trump comforting the Libs of TikTok and the Babylon Bee, two popular pro-Trump social media influencers.
Election timing
A possible forced divestment of TikTok could land in the heat of the 2024 election season. If Biden signs the legislation, ByteDance would have six months to find a buyer. A ban could be implemented as early as October this year, with the election scheduled for November 5.
Maybe the Democrats are calculating that the odds of it not going through are low. For example, the former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Steven Mnuchin, has already announced that he is convening a group of investors who are ready to buy TikTok if it goes on the market.
Still, the mere act of putting a platform that millions of young voters use for hours every day can only lead to political disadvantages.
Shutting down TikTok would increase demand for other social media platforms, as users look for alternatives. Trump, for example, has mourn that banning TikTok would “make Facebook bigger”.
This would force Democrats to rethink their strategies, to build new followings, and to repackage their messages for alternative apps. Yet varying demographics of user bases would ensure that it would not be a perfect one-to-one transition.
For example, according to the research company Insider Intelligence, around a quarter of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 34. On TikTok it’s almost half.
Biden may well find the national security threats posed by TikTok to be too steep a price to accept its continuation as it is. But it is difficult to call whether it will go ahead with the closure of TikTok before November – as a result of the election -.
