Pro-Harris TikTok was in a bubble until the election

TikTok Filter Bubble: How a Right-Wing Echo Chamber Becomes an Algorithmic Bubble — until Election Day

“As technology gets more advanced and more convincing, our idea of a communal reality might genuinely become archaic,” Williams says. This election has taught me that we end up being sucked into worlds on our phone when the real world is not in front of us.

Our window into their inner workings has gotten smaller as we’ve gotten more precise. This summer, Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a research tool used to track viral content on Facebook. Reporters used a public TikTok feature called the Creative Center to report on the Israel- Hamas war and that’s why the feature was stopped by the company. Outside of our bubbles it is hard to understand what is happening on social media.

TikTok obviously isn’t the only filter bubble out there. The platform, which was bought by Musk two years ago, now has a right-wing echo chamber with Musk’s own content. It was a deliberate strategy that paid off handsomely for Musk due to the fact that TikTok serves people things they like to sell ads.

Source: Pro-Harris TikTok felt safe in an algorithmic bubble — until election day

The Kamala HQ campaign on TikTok and Instagram was not a “great replacement” for a young woman in a pro-Harris bubble

Williams’ confidence began to break down on Election Day, as she walked to a watch party. “I know what I’m seeing on the internet and everything, but I still had [something] in my heart that was like, I don’t see us having another Donald Trump presidency, but I also don’t see a world where a Black woman gets elected for president right now,” she says. She started to wonder whether that much had changed in the eight years since the last female presidential candidate. This could be a mirage because you’re seeing all this stuff, and people are excited.

For many voters on TikTok, the Kamala HQ content was part of their voting experience. At times, the casual way in which the campaign spoke to viewers seemed borderline un serious. The Trump campaign used popular songs and post formats but didn’t seem to be as familiar to the platform, more of an attempt at TikTok. Smith said that there was a limit to how much she could stomach even while a Harris supporter. At a certain point, the trends get old, the songs get overplayed, and the line between a political campaign and everything else on TikTok starts to get blurry. Kamala HQ, Smith says, started to feel like just another brand.

She began to sense red flags in the positivity that was present on Election Day. She remembered TikTok telling her that she had to choose between her gas prices and her reproductive choice. She has a feed filled with strangers, but it felt risky to use rhetoric as a campaign strategy. Smith says that when he saw that messaging play out, he got a little uneasy. Harris lost the popular vote, the Electoral College and the election to President-elect Trump.

Democrats were hoping to get their message to followers with the help of aninfluencer likeAlexis Williams. For the last several years, Williams has made content about politics and social issues and attended the Democratic National Convention this year as a content creator, sharing her reflections with 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. She thought Harris would win the presidency in the days leading up to the election, despite her not being a perfect candidate.

A young person in a pro-Harris TikTok bubble likely wasn’t being fed racist “great replacement” story or false claims about election fraud. Instead, they were probably seeing videos from some of the hundreds of content creators the Democratic Party worked with. The impact of influencer content on electoral politics is difficult to measure, but research from NextGen America shows that it may result in more first-time voters.

According to Tzintzn Ramirez of the organization, they don’t know the full implications of X’s scheme to feed right wing propaganda. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, right-wing accounts have dominated visibility and engagement on X. The billionaire angles for influence with the incoming administration and that has an algorithmic boost to Musk’s own posts.

In hindsight, Smith wonders if that was the right thing to do or if a mix of different types of political content may have given her more insight into what the other side was saying, doing, and thinking. She thinks that it is helpful to know what the voters think about right-wing news outlets like Fox News, because they are a good indicator of how people will vote.

Smith is aware that the platform recommends her content depending on what she watches, saves, comments on, or likes. When pro-Trump content came across her For You page, Smith would purposely not engage and simply scroll away.

Source: Pro-Harris TikTok felt safe in an algorithmic bubble — until election day

TikTok: How The Internet Is Shaped to Prevent Election Dilemma, and Why We Shouldn’t Have To Give Up

It makes it hard for candidates to do their jobs, as well as making it harder for us to do our job. It makes it harder for news media to do their job, because now you’re talking about having to inform a public that has so many different sources of information,” she says.

In the weeks leading up to the US presidential election, Kacey Smith was feeling hopeful. Smith, who supported Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, says she knew it would be a close race between the Democratic nominee and Republican Donald Trump. But as she scrolled TikTok, she believed Harris would be victorious.

There are dozens more: Even before the election, former “Vlog Squad” member Corinna Kopf endorsed Trump. Mika Lafuente, a model and aninfluencer, posted a video on TikTok in which she endorsed Trump along with dance videos.

For example, some fans of Scout Dixon West, a perfumer and “cool girl” influencer, have recently criticized her for liking posts from Jessica Reed Kraus, the pro-Trump writer of the House Inhabit newsletter who initially started out as a mom blogger. Kraus could be found all along the campaign trail this cycle with either Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or the Trump campaign.

The women on my TikTok For You page were frustrated that some of their favorite lifestyle bloggers had come out in support of Trump. They’re sharing lists of “Trumpy” creators in comment sections and posting videos encouraging others to unfollow them as part of what could become a new “Block Out” movement.

It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.

The Trump campaign spoke to young men, creating a new style of fandom for him online. But it also seems like a new aesthetic of Trump 2.0 has emerged too.

Berman suggests that one should look to the return of Lauren. The aestheticization of Catholicism and the farm-to-table-to-Instagram-grid “tradwife.” These trends crept out of the more fringe parts of the internet in the Trump administration, but have since become more dominant in contemporary culture.

Over the past days, I have been thinking a lot about that TikTok I watched over the weekend. According to Elysia Berman, the foundations of a Trump presidency have been put in place for a long time because of the old money trends and quiet luxury of the lifestyle industry.