With over 100 million users and counting in the US, TikTok is beginning to play a major role in the political education and mobilization of its young user base.
In this episode, which was written and recorded in the aftermath of the November 2020 election, Talk Policy to Me reporter Noah Cole spoke with Aidan Kohn-Murphy and Toni Akande, two of the teens who run the “Gen Z for Change” TikTok page. Aidan and Toni touched on how they used traditional organizing practices to get out the vote through TikTok in the last election cycle, the tradeoffs between producing popular and substantive political content, and where they think the future of online political mobilization is headed. Noah also heard from four additional political TikTok creators during a speed round of questions on politics, policy, and online civic engagement.
More info on:
- Gen Z for Change https://genzforchange.us/ https://www.tiktok.com/@genzforchange
- Quentin Jiles https://linktr.ee/Qrjiles https://www.tiktok.com/@quentinjiles
- Elise Joshi https://www.tiktok.com/@elisejoshi
- Matthew Rein “The Dem Hype House” https://www.tiktok.com/@thedemhypehouse
- Colton Hess “Tok the Vote” https://www.tokthevote.com/ https://www.tiktok.com/@tok.the.vote
Transcript
Aiden: [00:00:00] It’s not just the short term defeating Trump. It’s about once you get young people involved in politics, they’re not going to leave like it was. It’s all about making young people understand that, like these aren’t just politics because we know, like, everything is political now. Like hanging out with your friends is political right now because we can’t do it because of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus. And we made a lot of videos stressing this that like your daily life, it is so impacted by politics, even if you don’t know it.
Colleen: [00:00:32] Hey, everyone. It’s Colleen Pulawski.
Reem: [00:00:34] And Reem Rayef here.
Colleen: [00:00:35] TikTok has taken over how Gen Z, millennials, and even some Gen Xers consume media.
Reem: [00:00:42] If you talk to young people or spend some time on the app yourself, you will find that TikTok is not just a place for dance challenges, cooking tutorials, and comedic sketches. It’s also a platform for political mobilization.
Colleen: [00:00:54] Between political hype houses, virtual voter registration efforts, Google doc resource lists, and actual policy analysis packaged into memes, a core subsection of Tiktok’s user base is focused on promoting civic engagement.
Reem: [00:01:10] And with somewhere in the ballpark of 100 million users in the U.S., it’s probably worthwhile to pay attention to what’s going on there. It’s tempting to dismiss TikTok and really all social media as kind of unserious spaces where teenagers waste time and boomers share fake news. But with the sheer volume of engaged users on the app, it’s safe to say that TikTok is playing some role in forming the next generation’s political education in the U.S..
Colleen: [00:01:37] So if this is your first foray into the TikTok extended universe, fear not. We’ll start with an interview between our audio reporter Noah Cole and Aidan Kohn-Murphy and Toni Akande from the TikTok page, Gen-Z for Change. We’ll hear about how Aiden and Toni put their lives on hold this past election cycle to get out the TikTok vote and where they think the future of online political mobilization is headed. And stick around, because we’ve got to speed around with a whole host of other politically savvy TikTok celebs.
Noah: [00:02:10] All right. We have two representatives from Gen-Z for change. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourselves?
Aiden: [00:02:16] My name is Aiden. I am 16 years old. I’m from Washington, D.C., and I am the co-founder and executive director of Gen Z for Change, formerly known as TikTok for Biden.
Toni: [00:02:26] Hi, my name is Toni. I’m 19 years old and I’m from Tennessee and I’m a leadership member.
Aiden: [00:02:32] So Gen-Z for Change is a group of 500 at TikTok creators with a combined following of over 200 million people, and we are a group dedicated to making social change in any way we can. We were founded about a month before the presidential election and our goal then was electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And we spent a month of our of our lives devoted to making videos and spreading awareness about voting and voter registration deadlines. And we even coordinated with the Biden campaign. And now post-election, we are keeping our infrastructure and trying to move forward to make change in any way we can.
Reem: [00:03:15] The way that Gen Z for change engaged users on TikTok was rooted in organizing practices common among grassroots organizations and electoral campaigns. After eight and worked for Senator Ed Markey, his reelection campaign, he came up with the idea of using relational organizing, which is basically leveraging your personal connections to inspire his online following to phone bank and register to vote in the upcoming presidential election.
Aiden: [00:03:41] The night of the first presidential debate and I was talking to some of my TikTok friends and we were talking about how we just felt totally powerless. Everyone knew that Trump was going to was going to be deranged going into the debate, but he kind of exceeded all I mean, I guess not exceeded, he just was so much worse than anyone could have expected. And we were all kind of powerless. And I was like, oh, what if we do something similar to TikTok for Markey but TikTok for Biden? And so I thought this was just going to be a group of like 20 creators and we were going to have one phone bank, but when we put the list for our creator friends to sign up, a lot of them signed up. And then when we went to the first meeting, I was going into it like ready to explain to them how our one phone bank was going to work, and they were all like, Oh, I’m going to add this creator, I’m going to add this creator. Like this person’s my friend or reach out to them. And by the end of the night, we were up to like 100 creators, and it kept growing and growing from 100 to 20089imjh to 500 creators with, as I said, a combined following of 200 million. And so it was all about reaching out to your friends, getting them involved.
Reem: [00:04:40] Content creation for Gen-Z for Change is extremely organized and highly professional. The Gen-Z for Change website boasts officers with titles like Executive Director of Operations and Director of Outreach and Partnerships. You might read this as cute, or you could read it as a sophisticated tactical decision that establishes the initiative’s credibility, both for content creators and for followers.
Toni: [00:05:05] Because there’s 400 creators, we can’t all have them on the account at once. So what we do is we have group leaders. And if anyone on the account wants to have a video, you talk to a group leader and say, Hey, I want to make this video or looks at the video to the group leader and we’ll talk about it with all the other group leaders and we’ll post it on the account. So we just try to keep things organized and make sure that everyone who is a part of the account has a say, but it’s still- it’s not chaotic.
Reem: [00:05:35] That hyper organized approach served one of the explicit goals of Gen-Z for Change, engaging Gen Z in the political process. Despite the fact that many of the creators and followers aren’t even of voting age.
Aiden: [00:05:48] I think that that was part of our message is that like, I mean, I can’t vote and a lot of our followers couldn’t vote. But it’s not just the short term of defeating Trump. It’s about once you get young people involved in politics, they’re not going to leave because there’s the attitude that, like, here’s my life if Trump wins, here’s my life if Biden wins, it’s the same thing, which is isn’t true. And so we spent a lot of time trying to emphasize why that wasn’t true.
Reem: [00:06:14] Convincing their peers to care about politics wasn’t the only obstacle Gen-Z for Change faced. It wasn’t uncommon for the team to confront opposition from online communities on both the left and right. Managing attacks from the right and real critique from the left became a part of the job.
Aiden: [00:06:31] The scene on Political TikTok is very strange. Most political TikTok are like socialist and communist and self-considered leftist. And I mean, I am. I would consider myself like a democratic socialist, but there is a lot of animosity towards people who participate in the electoral process, which I understand the concept of, but it’s like this is what we have right now. Joe Biden or Donald Trump is not the lesser of two evils. It’s like an evil, evil, evil man versus someone who is not as progressive as I would like. So it’s not like the lesser of two evils, but most- it wasn’t like a lot of hate, but everybody was coming from mostly leftist.
Toni: [00:07:13] Yeah. Adding on to what Aiden was saying, like the not necessarily hate, but the criticisms and actually also hate, it wasn’t from the Republicans. It was mostly from like the left side of Twitter or like the left side of TikTok.
Aiden: [00:07:27] Except, except actually do remember TikTok for Trump.
Toni: [00:07:30] Oh yeah. TikTok for Trump, I blocked them so I wouldn’t know.
Aiden: [00:07:33] TikTok for Trump was this group that emerged right after us some right after we had probably like 300,000 and it was made up of entirely white people and all of their videos were done with a voice modulator. So it was like, I think their opening video was like, you thought that TikTok for Biden would go unanswered. Well, you were wrong. And then it like showed all of it was a very weird thing. And it wasn’t like serious. But I mean, it was it was serious, but that we didn’t think of them very badly.
Reem: [00:08:09] Part of what makes Gen-Z for Change so successful on TikTok is their understanding of what type of content goes viral on the platform. They get the algorithm and they’re using it to their advantage. Aiden and Toni spoke about needing to simplify their content to increase engagement and the trade offs between making engaging content and making informative content.
Aiden: [00:08:31] In my experience, if you make a nuanced political video, those videos wouldn’t do that well because like you can say something stupid that Trump did, and that’ll do well because everyone knows about Trump. But like if I was talking about some policy change that the Betsy DeVos is enacting in the Education Department, most people don’t know who Betsy DeVos is and aren’t that interested in. I used to make mainly not only political content, and I’ve kind of shifted away from that because it is hard to grow that way. So what we did is like, we are I mean, a number of our creators were like solely political, but in our operation of just trying to reach as many people as possible. We like tried to loop in a lot of creators who may not necessarily make a lot of political content, and his followers might not like necessarily understand the importance of politics, as we talked about earlier. So if we were able to reach those people, then then that’s what we’re going to do. But we’re not. We knew that we weren’t going to persuade Republicans to vote for to vote for Biden. We knew that we weren’t going to like we didn’t want to preach to the choir people who are who are already voting for Biden, which I think we did to a certain extent. So we were kind of trying to reach people who follow these creators who, like, make funny content or just don’t talk about politics and they trust them. And so now they’re talking about politics. Now they listen.
Toni: [00:09:48] Yeah, I think that’s what makes our group different. It’s because it’s like a diverse group of people. For me, on my account, I don’t really talk about politics. The only time I did was was talking about TikTok for Biden and talking about a little bit of racial injustice. But other than that, I don’t I’ll try to stray away from politics because, like Aidan said, you have to be controversial in order to get on the For You page.
Reem: [00:10:15] Quick explainer for you grandmas and grandpas out there. The For You page is a home page of sorts on TikTok, a personalized feed for each user that recommends videos. Getting on the For You page is one of the ways to go viral on TikTok.
Toni: [00:10:30] It doesn’t even matter if you’re informative. You have to have controversial opinions in order to become a popular political creator.
Aiden: [00:10:39] We have to bridge the gap between making something entertaining to the average person who may not understand the deep like understand the nuances of politics, but also put in enough information so that people don’t just find it funny and not understand our point.
Toni: [00:10:56] Right. Like you have to. That’s the problem I’ve been finding. Like you have to add a lot of buzz words and like, you have to be a little bit controversial and it’s just you just have to try to find the balance between yet, like instead of entertaining and informational, our target audience are in high school or younger, so they probably want to be like stimulated instantly and want to get like instant gratification. It’s an entertainment app, number one, so people want to see that first before they see informational things.
Reem: [00:11:35] Aiden, Toni, and Gen-Z for Change were certainly not alone in their efforts to use TikTok for civic engagement and political mobilization during this past election cycle. Noah basically spoke with a who’s who of the political TikTok A-list. Who do we got, Colleen?
Colleen: [00:11:49] Colton Hess, creator of the voter registration effort, Tok the Vote; Quentin Giles, who provides political commentary on TikTok as “your political BFF;” Matthew Rein, creator of the Democratic Hype House; and Elise Joshi, a UC Berkeley undergraduate, a local celeb, who creates content on environmental advocacy and other political causes on TikTok. Noah asked each of these creators to respond to a speed round of questions about politics, policy, and TikTok. Here’s Noah again.
Noah: [00:12:22] So this is a podcast called Talk Policy To Me, so have to talk policy. What policies are you interested in?
Toni: [00:12:28] Defund the police.
Aiden: [00:12:29] The Green New Deal.
Elise: [00:12:30] Really everything that the Green New Deal entails, changing the way we treat immigration in this country, Berkeley’s 2035 report.
Quentin: [00:12:35] Number one, student loans–student loan cancellation for people. Second one, reparations for black folks. The third one, environmental justice.
Colton: [00:12:43] Voting rights. Climate policy. Criminal justice. LGBTQ rights.
Noah: [00:12:47] Who are your favorite politicians?
Toni: [00:12:50] When he was running, I really liked Bernie.
Aiden: [00:12:53] Warren, Markey, Bernie. Cory Bush is pretty awesome.
Elise: [00:12:57] Jacinda Ardern is the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Bernie Sanders. AOC is great too, of course.
Colton: [00:13:02] AOC really, her Instagram lives are kind of a modern day fireside chat.
Quentin: [00:13:06] I like AOC, I like the squad. Elizabeth Warren, that’s my girl. I call her Lizzie Girl.
Matthew: [00:13:13] You know, got to love the squad Omar Pressley. AOC, of course.
Noah: [00:13:19] What’s one piece of advice you’d have to someone who’s trying to drive civic engagement through TikTok?
Toni: [00:13:23] Do what you’re passionate about. There’s no point in doing this unless you’re really passionate about it. And there’s no point of doing it without getting into something that you’re passionate about, talking about something that you’re passionate about, and make sure that you’re open to learn because your views will definitely change.
Aiden: [00:13:40] This kind of a general thing. Don’t be afraid to phone bank. I did not want a phone bank. I wanted to like try to organize at a quote unquote higher level, and that was kind of naive and silly of me.
Elise: [00:13:52] Don’t be nervous. I was totally unsure of my capabilities for making TikTok videos. I just had full faith that my information was going to be good enough. And it was.
Quentin: [00:14:05] Yeah, just be factual and be yourself. Don’t try to be. Just be yourself. Don’t try to be me. Don’t try to be any of these other creators’ essence. There are some great political creators that don’t do it like I do it, and they are phenomenal.
Matthew: [00:14:19] Just be honest and truthful with what you believe in and then back up what you believe in with factual information.
Colton: [00:14:25] Just be authentic and use use cited data and facts and figures whenever you can. Don’t spend time engaging with with people that are, you know, hating on you. Just try to use that time to to reach out to more people and connect with more people.
Noah: [00:14:41] Are you confident in the direction this country is headed?
Aiden: [00:14:46] I am not confident at all. I mean, I think that there is it is imaginable that we can pull it off. But sometimes I think about this, I know this is a speed round, but sometimes I think about like we have so many problems in our world, but it, but in America as well. And on top of that, like the East Coast is going to be underwater in like 150 years. And so like there is we are seeing the extreme effects of climate change and that on top of like all of the other huge problems facing our world just gets me overwhelmed sometimes. I’m like our country and world, we’re just like, if we’re just not going to take action on climate change and then it’s going be over.
Toni: [00:15:28] Me Neither, I’m not. And I feel like because Biden is a president elect, people are becoming a little bit too comfortable with the way things are now. But there’s so much work that we need to do.
Matthew: [00:15:43] I’m confident in our generation, and I’m more so hopeful for our generation and what we’re going to be able to do for this country. It is distressing to see that 74 million Americans still decided to vote for Donald Trump. I do have genuine hope for the future direction of this country, and I’ll stick with that because frankly, there is no alternative to hope.
Colton: [00:16:05] And feeling much more confident than I was a few months ago. And, you know, we’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of us. It’s going to be a bumpy few years and longer than a few years likely. But I’m an optimist. I, I think if we really, really keep the momentum up and keep working, I’m confident about about the direction we’re heading, especially with with Gen Z aging into the electorate more at each election and and making their voices heard. I’m confident. I’m optimistic.
Reem: [00:16:45] Something I’m really struck by is this lethal combination of optimism and realism and sophistication that I hear in these responses. These super engaged teenagers really clearly see the importance of political engagement without centering that political engagement on a single political candidate or a single presidential race. It’s really striking, especially when I think back to my own political awareness when I was in high school and even college. Elise and Colton and Aidan and Matthew and Quentin and Toni are all so beyond the get out the vote and Rock the Vote stuff. They’re making really strategic calculations about how to expend their efforts, when to participate in the system and when to fight it. I’m just impressed and ready to go viral on TikTok.
Colleen: [00:17:25] And this episode brings me back to the end of our City engagement episode, where Heather Imboden implored us all to take young people seriously, to not write them off, to listen to their demands. And this group of teens are just so keenly aware of their power on a platform like TikTok. Their tactical maneuvers, their collaboration with each other. This astute negotiation of power dynamics and politics and their tenacity just all come together to wield that power with incredible agility and force. And I think it’s also worth noticing here how aware they are of the trade offs of this work between style and substance, for example. They’re not just blindly using these platforms. They’re assessing and confronting their limits all along the way. I’m also just curious to keep an eye on the development of their work in the greater landscape of politics and social media, especially as we increasingly start to see social media platforms wielded by high profile politicians like AOC and Jon Ossoff.
Reem: [00:18:26] Talk policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.
Colleen: [00:18:41] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.
Reem: [00:18:45] Editing for this episode by Noah Cole.
Colleen: [00:18:49] The music you heard today is by Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Mesiti-Miller.
Reem: [00:18:53] I’m Reem Rayef.
Colleen: [00:18:55] I’m Colleen Pulawski.
Reem: [00:18:56] Catch you next time.
