What happens when politicians meet TikTok?

Proving that no form of escapism is a safe refuge from the people who want your vote in November, politicians are invading TikTok. For any young people planning to turn to TikTok when every television show, YouTube channel and Instagram feed becomes clogged with campaign ads this fall, think again. TikTok is now the domain of cringe-worthy or creative politicians trying to appeal to a new generation of voters.

We already know how politicians will change TikTok; it will be about as cool as someone’s parents showing up at a college party. But how will TikTok change politics?

Answering this question means taking what we know about politics on social media and adapting it to the unique characteristics of its newest platform. TikTok is fundamentally different from the social media platforms that have come before it because, in essence, it’s not social. People do not go to TikTok to Facebook with old friends, Snap with new ones, follow the tweets of people they know or celebrities they feel like they know, or gaze at curated scenes from everyone’s best Insta-lives.

You go to TikTok, instead, to be entertained by strangers. It’s a generally passive experience of viewing videos produced by people with whom you have no connection and really don’t even know. Rather than drawing you closer to your own community, it’s about sampling from a wide, exciting but unfamiliar and largely anonymous world. What you watch is not driven by who you are friends with but by an algorithm that feeds you more of whatever you watch. 

For politics, the hopeful version of this scenario is that — because the TikTok you see is dictated more by your whims than by your network of friends — it will provide opportunities for politicians to reach audiences they otherwise might not access. They may find ready audiences for their ideas even among viewers who don’t share their party or other allegiances. The political messages you see on Facebook and Twitter are often echoes in the chamber of the alliances and social structures in which we live, IRL. 

What we see on TikTok is driven by ourselves. This could give politicians the chance to reach out to teens and young adults, people at the most flexible and formative years in their lives, even if candidates might not be the political side that their friends, relatives and favorite celebrities suggest for them. This could enable appeals across party lines, opening up opportunities for politicians who might take an idiosyncratic set of positions rather than following one party’s orthodoxy.

The dark side of replacing social suggestions with the TikTok algorithm, of course, is that this algorithm is not a benevolent truth seeker. It allows us to take ourselves down whatever dark alleys we like. You don’t search TikTok; Tik Tok searches you. Simply letting your eyeballs rest on a video is all you need to do to tell the algorithm “I want more.” Although it has a search bar, users primarily open the app and just start watching. This does not encourage our best natures, especially in the civic sphere. It is the equivalent of rubbernecking at a car wreck, with this glance causing more wrecks. We’re already attracted to opinion more than fact in politics on social media and especially to negative opinions. So where will the instant feedback mechanism of TikTok lead us? Likely to even higher levels of toxicity.

Finally, there is a threat in the way that TikTok’s stars and its metadata are shrouded in secrecy.  Social media began with an ethos of authenticity. Part of the idea behind Facebook was that you cannot be anonymous — your virtual friends know who you actually are, and that means they can hold you accountable.   

TikTok, again, is different. Content producers often go by pseudonyms and TikTok itself limits access to information about the origin of its videos, the details of its algorithm, or its data. These are not familiar faces or groups that we know and it may be impossible to follow up to find out who they are. 

That’s an open invitation to spread false information. The Hill recently reported that misinformation posted on TikTok, as well on Twitter, is amplified more than on any other social media platform. And it is both easier to fact-check a tweet, because it is text rather than a video, and to shame the person who tweeted it. But in the new world of TikTok, relatively unknown people can say whatever they want in an eight-second video. If it is novel, if it riles emotion, and if it captures eyeballs, it goes viral. That could lead our politics further down into toxicity and lies. 

Put all these together and they are the schematic for a perpetual motion machine of disinformation. This medium eases the creation, circulation and amplification of content designed to mislead about our politics, our politicians and, more worrying, about the security and fairness of our elections. Cringe-worthy politicians undoubtedly will ruin the cool factor of TikTok, but will we allow it to ruin our politics?

Thad Kousser is a professor of political science and co-director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at University of California San Diego. Follow him on Twitter @ThadKousser.