Is TikTok a cultural propaganda machine?

Confused about what’s going on with TikTok? So are we. But it’s probably the most “2020” story of 2020 — a perfect storm of geopolitics, national security, social media, pop music, and of course, Donald Trump. In August, Trump issued an executive order promising to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform to an American bidder by November.

It’s not implausible that the President’s distaste for TikTok began when a group of K-Pop-loving teens used it to sabotage his rally in Tulsa in June. But he’s also been framing the platform as a vehicle for Chinese espionage and propaganda — much to the chagrin of free-speech advocates and the platform’s own users, who argue that banning TikTok constitutes a violation of the First Amendment, on par with social media censorship in China.

Just this past Sunday, a Federal judge overturned Trump’s order to halt downloads in U.S. app stores. But even if conversations with prospective American buyers like Oracle and Walmart do materialize in a sale by the November 12 deadline, we’re probably going to be talking about the political ramifications of the Gen Z-focused juggernaut for some time—simply by dint of the fact that TikTok is a massively popular social media platform, with 850 million monthly active users and counting. And massively popular social media platforms tend to give rise to new forms of political behavior.

On TikTok, we’re already seeing Black Lives Matter protest memes vying for attention with output from Ted Kaczynski-obsessed anarcho-primitivists, far-right “hype houses,” and self-styled “cults.” Given this, the platform certainly appears to be a more powerful tool for political communication than millennial-generation skeptics would suspect. But is TikTok the cultural propaganda machine that conservatives are making it out to be? We hit up friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger, an assistant professor of political science and data analytics at Penn State, to find out.

Kevin, who studies how social media and other technologies are changing political communication, recently teamed up with some colleagues to produce the first large-scale quantitative descriptive analysis of “TikTok Politics,” examining user behavior across 712,193 political TikToks from 5,295 accounts. On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we discuss why TikTok’s unusually information-dense interface—one where users consume a rapid stream of televisual information while responding with home-made videos of their own—makes it such an ideological force-multiplier. We also discuss the social signifiers embedded within its “embodied memes,” how songs like Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” drive conversations both inside and across ideological lines, and the app’s role in incubating extremely niche subcultures like “Zoomer Marxists Who Hate Golf.” Many thanks to journalist Drew Millard for coming along for the ride.

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