In 2020, hundreds of top TikTok content creators came together in service of a single goal: getting Joe Biden elected. They posted videos, organized online events and spent hours training followers to help Biden defeat Donald Trump.
Four years later, the coalition once known as TikTok for Biden is now called Gen-Z for Change — and so far it has not supported Biden’s reelection.
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
“Biden is out of step with young people on a number of key issues,” said coalition founder Aidan Kohn-Murphy, 20, who called “the frustrations of young progressive leaders a barometer of widespread discontent among Gen Z voters.” ”
On TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch, anger and resentment toward Biden are boiling among Generation Z content creators, who say they feel dissatisfied and betrayed by Biden’s positions on a range of issues, including the war in Gaza, the climate crisis and the President’s decision. to support a possible TikTok ban. The divide has been exacerbated by the White House’s evolving strategy to court friendly influencers and shut out others critical of the administration.
As Biden took office in 2021, the White House sought to strengthen its relationships with Gen Z content creators, working with them to advance the coronavirus vaccine rollout and inform them on important issues. During one such briefing on the 2022 war in Ukraine, Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Matt Miller, special adviser for communications at the White House National Security Council, told influencers that Biden considered them the “new media” and would aim to retain. informed.
Lately, however, influencers’ strategies appear to have shifted, both in the White House and within the Biden campaign, influencers say.
“I’ve noticed that there have been a lot more events with creators, but the creators who are invited are the creators who are very pro-Biden and just parrot talking points or share photos of themselves smiling with the president. Not the creators who have been critical,” said Kahlil Greene, a history content creator and education advocate in Washington, who said he has not been invited to the White House since criticizing the administration over the TikTok ban and the war in Gaza.
Annie Wu Henry, a political influencer and digital strategist who has worked on Democratic campaigns, agrees. While the White House once treated creators as independent media, she says, they now seem to be favored.
Biden’s team “is trying to say they deal with influencers like the press. But the point is, the press conference room has to have Fox News anyway. They need to let all the media in,” Henry said. “When it comes to influencers, they only let in people who agree, and anyone who pushes back even a little bit is not welcome.”
This picking and choosing has had major consequences for Biden: In the first four months of this year, nearly a quarter of TikTok’s top left creators posted anti-Biden content, according to social media analytics firm CredoIQ, with this posts have been viewed more than 100 million times together.
Much of the anti-Biden content is posted by young, non-white liberals with “shared ideology that the US government, and specifically Joe Biden, wants to stem the flow of free speech and information,” CredoIQ found. “This perceived attack on free speech allows anti-Biden sentiment to spill over from a smaller demographic of pro-Palestinian young progressives” – who are outraged by Biden’s support for Israel as it wages a brutal war in Gaza – “to a potentially market-moving bloc of unenthusiastic young voters angry about the TikTok ban.”
According to a recent Morning Consult poll, two-thirds of Gen Z voters — 67 percent — say Biden’s decision to support legislation that could lead to a TikTok ban has made them less likely to vote for him in November to vote. Smaller groups say they are turned off by the president’s handling of the war in Israel (46 percent) and Biden’s approval of new oil and gas drilling projects on federal land (38 percent).
A White House spokesperson said administration officials “continue to hold substantial meetings and discussions with creators who hold different positions — including those who disagree with us on important issues.”
“This White House has taken historic steps to engage digital creators, and is working hard to meet Americans where they are,” the spokesperson said. “…We will continue to lift their voices and use a variety of platforms to reach Americans who do not closely follow traditional news.”
Democrats have long struggled to compete with conservatives online. While Trump and other conservatives enjoy the support of a host of right-wing content creators and platforms, Democrats have sought to recruit influencers to amplify their message. As president, Barack Obama tried to woo the Vine stars and conducted interviews with YouTubers about policy initiatives during his second term. During the 2020 campaign, Biden created an influencer partnership team in July, shortly before the Democratic convention.
This time, the Biden campaign started its influencer outreach earlier and on a broader scale, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Dozens of employees are focused on recruiting content creators, and the campaign works with more than 550 of them. It is advertising a manager position to develop partnerships with meme pages — social media accounts where users post fun images and videos — that bring in up to $85,000 a year.
While some influencers feel unfairly left out, Biden supporters say the campaign is really struggling to respond to a rapidly evolving media landscape in which some influencers consider themselves traditional journalists while others are paid for their opinions.
‘I think they are in a political situation. There just isn’t a traditional communication structure for creators,” said Keith Edwards, pro-Biden political content creator. “If they were press, this kind [restricted access] would be outrageous, but they are in a strange space where they occupy media attention, but they are not a traditional press. And I don’t know if anyone knows the right way to participate. Is it traditional press reach? Is it paid? [marketing] work? This is something we are all learning together as the media changes rapidly.”
To help recruit new online supporters, the Biden campaign has contracted Village Marketing, an influencer marketing company, which in April began sending outreach emails to a slew of popular content creators, emails show who viewed The Post.
“On behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign team, we are seeking supporters on social media for the 2024 elections!” said the email, which offered creators the chance to become “an official campaign partner.” Interested parties were directed to a portal where they could link their social media accounts and provide access to account metrics such as audience data.
Village Marketing founder Vickie Segar said many creators are hesitant to post about politics given the controversial online climate and several platforms’ decisions to downgrade political content.
“We are here to talk it out with all the creators who are hesitant [about Biden] and who have questions,” Segar said. “I hope more people join in as we get closer to the elections. We want President Biden elected, we agree with his values and policies, and we are here to support that.”
But creators are less eager to join a political campaign in 2024 than they were in 2020. On TikTok, for example, many creators who were relatively new to the industry four years ago and were working to build their following have become powerful multiplatform influencers that operate profitable media companies that reach tens of millions of young people. Today, they say they expect more in return for their support.
In 2020, “Gen Z brought Biden to power with our votes and with our platforms,” says Hassan Khadair, a content creator in Birmingham, Alabama, with 6.3 million followers on TikTok, 2.8 million subscribers on YouTube, a podcast and a robust network. track in countless other apps.
This time, Khadair said, “He has to earn that vote. We’re not going to give it to him just because we don’t want Trump to win. We did that once. We won’t do it twice.”
Elise Joshi, executive director of Gen-Z for Change, a content creator and climate activist, said she hosted Zoom calls in 2020 with hundreds of other young people outlining why they should vote for Biden. Now, she said, she and others her age have a host of reasons to feel betrayed.
Joshi said she appreciated Biden’s climate policies at the time and how he said he planned to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. Today, Joshi said, Biden is allowing record-breaking oil and gas extraction on public lands while “doubling down on the fossil fuel economy.”
Joshi said she and others are also frustrated by Biden’s “mishandling” of the pandemic, which “remains a crisis and we can’t even get masks in health care.” While “fighting the pandemic was a central issue of Biden’s 2020 campaign,” she said, “it does not appear to be a top priority now.”
Finally, Joshi said that many young people are outraged by the government’s inability to negotiate an end to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. “The group that rallied people around Biden in 2020 is the same group that built a tool that sent more than 100 million emails to the government urging a ceasefire,” she said.
Joshi said she doesn’t mind being on the guest list for events like the White House Christmas party for digital content creators. What angers her is the president’s inability to address the substantive concerns of Gen Z influencers, she said — though she acknowledged that the White House climate office had recently contacted her directly about a pause in the approval of new liquefied natural gas projects.
“I would rather have a meaty climate strategy conversation with them than get an invite somewhere,” Joshi said.
Alaina Wood, a sustainability scholar and Generation Z content creator, said she also felt disconnected from the Biden administration since becoming more critical of his policies. “As soon as I thought, I’m not going to praise you all the time, I’m not going to be a propaganda piece for you, they stopped talking to me,” she said.
Wood and other creators said they are skeptical that Biden’s latest efforts to recruit influencers would make a material difference in Gen Z’s support for his re-election.
“If the comments section of my videos is any indication,” she said, “many people, especially young people, don’t want to vote for Biden again.”
related content
A graduate’s silent protest: putting a banned book into use
