Joe Biden’s TikTok Troubles

In a January social-media post, MSNBC host Chris Hayes wondered, “Do the Biden campaign people understand the degree to which he is being *annihilated* on the social media platforms where young people get most to all of their news and information about the world?”

The premise was fair and the question reasonable. In popular videos on social-media platforms favored by young people, especially TikTok and Instagram, Joe Biden is frequently portrayed — by progressives, not MAGA acolytes — as a doddering old man, a corrupt Establishment tool, as a failure on environment issues and student-loan forgiveness, and as either complicit in or actively supporting war crimes or genocide. During the 2020 election, the Biden campaign was proudly aloof from much of social media, won anyway, and has since claimed vindication for its light-touch strategy of selective engagement, influencer partnerships, and cultivating “Facebook moms.” Maybe they really don’t know what’s going on out there, which doesn’t seem ideal, or maybe they just don’t care, which seems like a risk worth talking about.

The 2024 election, even more than in 2020, will be decided in the context of a chaotic, fragmented, and substantially broken media environment. An election in which no one strategy particularly matters can also be understood as an election where everything matters, including the president getting “annihilated” by politically engaged young people in venues older voters never see. What’s the Biden campaign planning to do about that?

Two weeks and at least three news cycles about Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness later, the Biden campaign has made a statement on the matter, in the form of his campaign’s first TikTok:

The post feels like a throwback to a time when politicians posting on social media was still novel, and it doesn’t quite work even on its own terms: It’s almost a riff on a popular TikTok format; it’s almost ironic; it includes an obligatory reference to “Dark Brandon” with his laser eyes. The post’s top commenters have other things on their minds:

8 hrs edited down to 30 seconds👍

How many takes??

Let’s get a new president

i can’t afford gas or rent

What about Rafah?

My team that I support is Rafah

WHAT ABOUT RAFAH?

The negative comments are specific, mocking, and angry; the scattered positive comments are generic and borderline patronizing (“Awesome 🔥,” “This is so cute”). It’s presumably the first post of many, and the Biden campaign has time to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing here and on social media in general. In September, Biden’s deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty teased some changes in their approach to Politico:

The president’s reelection team is formally launching its campaign war room on social media Wednesday. With the handle Biden HQ, it will serve as a rapid response operation aimed at reaching voters by pumping out content — lots of content.

Aides involved in it have adopted the mantra “more is more.” They’re starting on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Threads, but they’re looking to work a host of mediums beyond those …

… “[Biden HQ] gives us the ability to just be a little punchier, to get a little bit more volume out there,” Flaherty said, “but also help drive narratives on social [media] at a higher clip.”

The campaign will also be doubling down on “rapid response” videos highlighting crazy things opponents are doing and saying. What this looks like, at the moment, is cross-platform “Dark Brandon” jokes about conspiracies that the Super Bowl had been rigged. On X, which is now functionally a right-wing platform, responses have been harsh, but in a way that isn’t particularly relevant to Biden’s voter outreach. On Meta’s Threads, the softly anti-politics platform where the campaign is posting (mostly news clips) dozens of times a day, the response was somewhat more positive, but dispiriting in its own way. “I kid you not, there are people on Threads responding to it with Texts from Hillary memes,” writes Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day, referring to a 12-year-old meme about Clinton using her BlackBerry in sunglasses. The campaign didn’t bother sharing the joke on the president’s campaign Facebook page, a curated, gentle, low-engagement environment featuring frequent updates highlighting his accomplishments, as well as a lot of screenshots of X posts.

Over the next few days, the campaign posted seven more TikToks: a supercut of Trump bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade; a clip of Biden making an unfortunately half-formed joke about his age; a shocking Trump clip with a “He really said that …” caption; a CNN clip about Trump’s incoherence; a critique of double standards in mainstream coverage of Biden and Trump’s ages; a video about Biden’s dinner at the home of a Raleigh constituent and his family, with a reminder about public-service student-loan forgiveness; another cable news clip, this one from AOC. It’s a cautious strategy off to a modest start that’s a long way from having the ability to “drive narratives” in any meaningful sense.

It’s also giving me a sense of déjà vu. In early 2016, I spent months scraping data from Facebook to try to understand how people were talking about the upcoming presidential election. The most significant finding was that a significant majority of popular and highly engaged political Facebook pages were conservative and pro-Trump, and that the candidate’s most extreme positions were what resonated most with his Facebook fans. In hindsight, this might sound obvious, but at the time it was an outlying indicator — the biggest platform of the time felt like Trump country. It’s plausible but debatable that Facebook helped Trump win in 2016; it’s obviously true that what was happening in hundreds of millions of Facebook feeds that year had something to say about where politics were headed, imminently.

More relevant to 2024 is how the platform processed the other candidates. Before either party had nominated its candidate, Facebook users had nominated theirs: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. When Sanders left the race, and national media attention shifted to Hillary Clinton, Facebook diverged. Progressive pages didn’t consolidate around Clinton — they shifted to anti-Trump content. For the remainder of the campaign on Facebook, Clinton was defined almost entirely by her MAGA opponents but also represented a surprisingly small share of the overall conversation on Facebook, even if you counted negative posts. Lots of enthusiastic Clinton supporters used the platform, of course — it was, in 2016, as close to social-media hegemony as Facebook would ever get. As far as Facebook’s most engagement-hungry political operators could tell, however, Clinton supporters didn’t post or share like their peers. She wasn’t technically an incumbent, but her party was, and her campaign’s message was incumbent-like; she positioned herself as the alternative to a candidate who was promising radical change, and her campaign’s strategy was to emphasize the ways that this radical change would be a disaster. Attempts to tell an affirmative story on social media about a Clinton presidency got less engagement than messaging about how Trump was a monster, and so that’s what people in and outside of the campaign did, mostly.

In the narrow context of social media, this suggested something interesting: Social platforms abhor an incumbent. After all, what is social media good for? Collecting and expressing energy in favor of change; protesting or just complaining; mounting attacks; establishing alternative narratives; building a new following. What is it less good for? Deliberative discourse; defending yourself; tending to an existing following. It’s right there in the business model! The most financially successful forms of social-media advertising aren’t brand-awareness ads or clever messaging exercises — they’re direct-response ads that convince users to buy or sign up for something new, right now. Trump dealt with this problem by denying incumbency, posting like an insurgent outsider even as he occupied the seat of power. It was a performance that became less convincing and more extreme over time — the man was actually president! — while allowing Joe Biden, a moderate former vice-president, to message normalcy to some voters as its own form of radical change.

If that’s the case, then Biden now finds himself in a position like Clinton’s, only slightly worse: posting either defensively or as a safe alternative to a more engaging opponent. He’s an actual incumbent and seen like one. To his strongest supporters, his reelection represents continuity, safety, and gradual progress; to everyone else, it represents the status quo, for better or for worse. Voters are in some ways inured to Trump’s public persona, and his social-media performance was normalized for four years as the voice of the American state. Simply repeating what he says and reminding people that it’s crazy — posting about posting — is only going to go so far. Likewise for articulating this critique as a (fair!) complaint about fairness, as Clinton frequently did and as Biden is already doing on TikTok and elsewhere.

Facebook probably mattered at the margins in 2016, and it was a narrow election. The Trump campaign spent a lot of money there and used ill-gotten data to bolster its efforts; it benefited from a social-media environment that favors movement-building over reputation maintenance. But, eight years on, the main lesson of the Facebook election should be clear: Trump’s organic popularity on Facebook was a missed warning about his electability in general. On Facebook — which was, granted, a platform where no two users had the same news feed — Trump’s election wasn’t a surprise at all.

Biden’s TikTok predicament should be understood in a similar way: as a problem his campaign probably can’t solve by posting on TikTok, which instead tells a series of uncomfortable stories that shouldn’t be ignored. After Trump won in 2016, Facebook spent a few years as an all-purpose scapegoat for Democrats; this time, it would be TikTok’s turn. The platform’s recent implication in the war in Gaza offers a preview as well as a specific warning. Some supporters of Israel have emphasized the role of TikTok in explaining opposition to their cause, collapsing complex, generational political shifts that predate the platform — not to mention the brutal, visible realities of the military campaign itself — into a pat (and, for what it’s worth, strategically inert) narrative about algorithms and easily duped teens.

If Facebook in 2016 was treated by Democratic campaigners as the land of the unknowable MAGA hordes, and then subsequently as a black-box explanation for their defeat, in 2024, TikTok and Instagram offer new and convenient containers in which to package and then toss out a very different bloc of voters, whose radical views and low turnout have been vexing the mainstream Democratic Party since before their grandparents were kids. The Biden campaign’s encounters with TikTok should give it pause, not as a root problem, but as a vivid, uncomfortable complement to abundant polling on the subject, and as evidence of underestimated feeling: Many young progressives aren’t just unenthusiastic about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, or tiring of lesser-evil messaging from Democrats. They’re genuinely alienated from the party and its candidate, and mad enough to post about it.