I suspect many readers knew little, if anything, about Charlie Kirk before his murder on the 10 September. But if you have teenage kids they probably did. For months my son has been being showing me TikTok clips of Kirk being “owned” by progressive students during his tour of university campuses. In schools across Britain this has been the biggest story of the year by far. With his fast-speaking and combative style, Kirk was perfectly suited to a site whose users watch for an average of three seconds before they flick on to the next video.
Meanwhile, my eldest daughter has been captivated by the overthrow of the Nepalese prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, and his replacement by former Supreme Court judge Sushila Karki. Not only did she know about this from watching TikTok videos but the revolution itself was driven on the streaming site by young people barely older than her.
The immediate trigger for the protests was the government’s decision to shut down dozens of social media sites including Facebook, X and YouTube. Ministers claimed the sites were failing to abide by new regulations but the “Gen Z” protestors believed the real reason was to stop the spread of viral memes about nepotism that showed politicians’ children living in luxury. Protests quickly descended into violence and the resignation of ministers. Incredibly, the new prime minister was chosen via a vote on Discord, another social media platform.
Though Nepal is one of the most dramatic examples of this type of protest it is not unique. Last year the Bangladeshi government was overthrown by a similar demographic, and in Nairobi mass protests against new taxes have been organised over TikTok and other platforms. In August, the Indonesian government found itself facing violent protests over salary boosts for politicians. Tellingly, one of their countermeasures was to ask TikTok to stop live streaming.
The average age in all of these countries is thirty or below (twenty-five in Nepal and just twenty in Kenya), compared to forty-one in Britain and thirty-eight in Australia. That magnifies both the effect of disenchantment with lack of employment opportunities but also the power of new forms of politics.
While all this has been going on the United States and China have been negotiating a deal over TikTok’s future in America. That a video streaming website would be at the heart of a complex trade deal with global consequences is an indication of how important it has become. Trump has been personally involved, discussing the issue with Xi Jinping, because he knows how critical the site is for boosting his support. TikTok users who get their news from the site were one of the groups that swung most away from Joe Biden in last year’s election.
In Britain, TikTok is already the biggest source of news for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds and rising up the rankings fast for older teenagers and those in their twenties and thirties. Among all adults it’s now as big a news source as ITV, Channel 4 and the Daily Mail. It’s by far the fastest growing social media platform globally, with more than a billion monthly users. Critically users spend far more time on the site than on others.
So why has it been so successful? What are the risks, both geopolitically and in terms of domestic politics? How is it going to change political engagement? And can a generation of politicians brought up on older forms of media make it work for them?
TikTok’s success is driven by its “for you” feed, which is what one first encounters when joining the site. Unlike X, Bluesky or Instagram, which can feel offputtingly empty on arrival, content is immediately fired at users. Initially it’s a scattergun mix of celebrities, influencers, memes and news but as you start watching some videos, flicking past others, and following other accounts, it quickly refines to a bespoke feed.
Where TikTok’s algorithm really differs from others is in the way it continues to feed in more experimental content alongside things it’s figured out a user will like, which allows it to constantly refine and makes it much easier for new trends to develop. If you make a video on the site it is guaranteed to appear in some peoples’ feeds even if you have no followers. If it’s watched by them it will be sent to more people, allowing complete unknowns to go viral in a way that is much harder on YouTube or other sites.
While platforms like X and Facebook have been undermining the traditional “gatekeeping” role of newspapers and broadcasters for some time, this approach makes TikTok even more democratic and messy. On older sites, feeds tend to be dominated by big players and users can assess whether to trust them or not. On TikTok there’s a constant stream of information from random people with no sense of whether it’s true or not. There are also vast numbers of AI videos with no indication they are not real.
Speed is also important. Videos can run for up to an hour — though those made using tools on the site have a limit of ten minutes. But the vast majority are much shorter, most under a minute, many just a few seconds. They require no attention span, which is why users spend so long scrolling.
As the culture writer Ted Gioia wrote last year, this is all part of a greater shift:
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.
As Gioia explains, this endless search for distraction has potentially ugly consequences:
The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure… At a certain point, addicts still pursue the stimulus, but more to avoid the pain of dopamine deprivation.
Regardless of the impact on mental health, the dopamine culture approach to content certainly changes the way people think about politics. Simple, emotive and extreme messages work best to grab attention quickly. A while ago I set up an account and only followed mainstream news sites, and yet most of my feed quickly became highly polarised — with lots of Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing content as well as plenty of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson’s “Advance UK” party and random anti-immigration content. As polling analyst James Kanagasooriam puts it, “The lack of honest trade-offs is a distinct feature of an attention-scarce society.”
Such an attention-grabbing, addictive and unfiltered form of social media offers huge opportunities for organised misinformation. Of course, governments have been trying to interfere in other countries’ elections for a long time using all sorts of methods. Social media came to the fore during Brexit and Trump’s first win when there was lots of excitement about Russian interference. There undoubtedly was some, but it doesn’t seem to have been very successful and there’s no evidence it changed the results.
TikTok, though, is a more powerful tool than fake-troll armies posting on Twitter. Last year’s Romanian election highlighted the potential. The far-right candidate for president, Calin Georgescu, came from nowhere to win the first round before being barred from running by the Supreme Court. He is currently on trial for disrupting national security by colluding with Russia. TikTok was critical to his late surge in the polls.
Those organising the campaign used two main tricks. First, they paid one hundred influencers via a third party company to describe what they wanted in a candidate using a series of key words like “patriot” and “stability.” Then they gamed the algorithm by posting thousands of supportive comments about Georgescu below. TikTok removed more than 27,000 fictitious accounts, but far more than that were created. We saw similar attempts at interference during elections in Georgia and Moldova.
Western Europe isn’t immune either, though attempts to manipulate the algorithm are driven less by Russia and more by home-grown actors. In Germany, both the radical right AfD and left-wing Die Linke have been boosted by the platform at the expense of parties in the centre. The AfD has been particularly successful, racking up almost half a million views per video from their parliamentarians compared to 75,000 for those from the centre-left SPD. One study found that searches for political parties or parliamentarians in the run-up to the elections were significantly more likely to lead to suggested AfD content. This may well just be because of the way the site works rather than any deliberate manipulation, but it skews the user experience towards the extremes.
In Britain, the right’s Nigel Farage is the most followed politician by far (1.3 million followers) with the left’s Zarah Sultana (450,000) in second place. Farage’s Reform party’s videos get fourteen times the engagement of those from other political parties. As yet this is not showing up much in voting intention polls among younger people. Britain is unusual in its degree of age polarisation, with Reform and the Tories doing far better with older people.
But polling of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, which is tricky to do and should be treated with caution, does suggest polarisation around Reform and the as-yet-unnamed left-wing vehicle proposed by Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn (though this appears to have fallen apart before it even managed to launch). With sixteen-year-olds able to vote at the next election, the current twelve-to-fifteen age group, who are most likely to use TikTok for news, will have a say too.
Beyond Europe, a big question is the extent to which China might seek to manipulate the algorithm given the state’s role in running the company. The government has a “golden share” in Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, which gives it board representation and veto power over key business decisions. Just last week it banned the company from buying chips from the US firm Nvidia. Bytedance is also legally required to respond to government requests for data, which is one reason the US and European governments have serious security concerns. The company insists data is stored outside China, but there is scepticism about its safety.
Because TikTok’s algorithm is “black box” — we can’t see exactly how it’s tweaked to drive behaviour — it is impossible to be sure if there is any direct manipulation by China to drive desired political outcomes. There is, though, strong suggestive evidence. One study from Taiwan published earlier this year found a strong correlation between the amount of time spent on TikTok and pro-Chinese views. For instance, 26.8 per cent of those supporting Taiwan’s ruling party, the DPP, thought it was acceptable to give up Taiwan’s democratic system “for the sake of cross-strait peace” — ten points higher than for non-users.
A 2023 study from Rutgers University found similar effects on US users:
TikTok screentime positively and uniquely predicted favourability towards China’s human rights record. Notably, heavy users of TikTok (i.e., those with >3 hours of daily screentime) demonstrated a roughly 50 per cent increase in pro-China attitudes compared to non-users.
It also found evidence that anti-China content is suppressed: “The views-to-likes ratio for anti-China content on TikTok was 87 per cent lower than pro-China content even though the content was liked nearly twice as much.”
So how can governments, and politicians, adapt to this rapidly changing environment?
One option is regulation to mitigate risks around security and misinformation. The US government’s proposal to set up a separate American TikTok has not yet been finalised but it looks like it will be owned by a group of Trump-friendly Silicon Valley tycoons including the Murdochs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen, with Oracle hosting the US data. But critically it seems the new company will use the same algorithm as the global one, which would rather undermine the endeavour given that’s what really gives the owners power. It’s also not obvious that if the algorithm was handed over to a bunch of politically aligned plutocrats in the US that the risk of manipulation would be any lower, given Trump’s increasingly overt attempts to censor more traditional media and Elon Musk’s manipulation of X’s algorithm.
The European Union has taken a more conventional, and inevitably slower, approach to regulation via the Digital Services Act, or DSA, passed in 2022, that seeks to force large social media sites into increasing transparency. In May, a preliminary judgement concluded that TikTok is in breach of the DSA for failing to allow proper scrutiny of online advertising. If this holds they could be fined up to 6 per cent of their worldwide income. Investigations under DSA are also examining TikTok’s algorithm and interference in the Romanian election. Separately, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €530 million for sending users’ data to China in breach of European rules. In Britain, Ofcom handed out a £12.7 million fine for TikTok’s failure to stop under-thirteens joining the platform.
But all of this is either being appealed or will be absorbed by the company as a business cost. Old-school models of regulation, while worth trying, feel too slow to deal with a threat of this nature. Even banning the app, which would have serious free speech implications, wouldn’t solve the broader problem. India did so in 2020 after border clashes with China, and users just moved to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, which are products designed to replicate the same distraction techniques that TikTok has perfected. Meta and Google, who own these sites, are continuing to shift more in that direction under pressure to stay on top of the attention economy.
So even if some of the security issues can be dealt with via regulation, politicians are going to have to find a way to adapt how they communicate to this new era. This is a big problem for anyone with standard media training, which aims for the exact opposite of attention-seeking. Politicians have been told for decades to ignore the questions they’re asked, have a set of pre-determined talking points, and repeat them relentlessly, the aim being to avoid saying anything unintentionally newsworthy while hoping your message sticks in the viewer’s mind. This approach worked when politics was covered primarily by traditional broadcasters. But it is mind-numbingly dull to watch, which is why, now there are alternatives, almost no one under forty does anymore.
It’s been clear for some time that voters are increasingly looking for spontaneity in political communications, and some sense of an authentic set of beliefs, even if they don’t necessarily agree with them. Trump and Farage are often dishonest but they also disarmingly blunt, as are many of the most effective modern communicators on the left. A lot of supposedly negative content about Farage on TikTok ends up highlighting this (for example, videos of him being paid to say daft things by users of Cameo, a platform that facilitates personalised celebrity messages for a fee). Many of the most successful politicians on the platform barely talk about politics at all, instead chatting about clothes or food.
It’s an approach pioneered in Asia, where TikTok grew fastest and where the average voter is younger. One example was Prabowo Subianto’s successful campaign for the Indonesian presidency last year. As Fulcrum reported:
Prabowo’s campaign utilised TikTok to showcase a more relatable side of the often-stern defence minister. Viral videos captured him dancing, interacting with children, playing with his cat, and engaging in light-hearted activities. These efforts successfully softened his image, leading to the rise of the term gemoy (cute) to describe this new persona; this was indeed a stark departure from the rigid and authoritarian figure he was once perceived as.
Bongbong Marcos used a similar approach in his successful 2022 campaign for the Philippines presidency, playing down his own scandals and his family’s controversial history.
But even in the unlikely event that British PM Keir Starmer or Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch were able to adopt this kind of approach, this doesn’t feel like a sustainable way of doing politics. After all, Indonesia is one of the countries that has seen widespread Gen Z protests. If distraction is all there is then voters will quickly get distracted by the next trend.
Sometimes the effects of this trend-driven politics might be positive. I can’t claim vast knowledge of Nepalese politics but the new prime minister chosen over Discord seems like an improvement. But the trend is profoundly volatile and hardly conducive to stable liberal democracy.
Ultimately, as I discussed earlier this year, democracy relies on literacy:
Commentators in the soft-left to centre-right section of the political spectrum tend to prefer to make arguments in traditional written form. It better suits their somewhat earnest form of politics. If fewer people — including graduates — are reading and more political content is both visual and being driven algorithmically that is going to become an ever bigger problem. And even if progressives and centrists get better at providing content in that form it could only be by sacrificing their arguments… Reasoning is not very important to the impact of a thirty-second video.
In that post I emphasised the importance of education and a focus on reading in schools as one way of trying to deal with this, something Britain is doing relatively well at compared to other countries. We should also do more to teach young people (and ideally adults too) about how to spot misinformation.
In the end, though, the only thing that can defeat distraction culture is a backlash: a gradual understanding among users that addiction to dopamine hits isn’t making them any happier. There is some evidence that this is starting to be understood. In 2024, 48 per cent of US teens said social media harms people their age, up from 32 per cent in 2022. Forty-five per cent said they spend too much time on it, up from 36 per cent. A British survey of school pupils found 71 per cent saying they’d taken temporary digital detoxes. Parents are even more worried, with growing pressure on governments round the world to legislate on smartphone use.
Yet there is no sign of the growth in platforms like TikTok slowing down, and their impact on politics is increasing all the time. One of the defining battles of the coming years will be between our collective willpower and the commercial value of distraction to the most valuable companies on the planet. •
