US Election 2020: Tik Tok made its way into the campaigns
President Donald Trump may be warning to close TikTok’s US operations and Joe Biden’s campaign team has effectively been impeded from using the video-sharing app – but that hasn’t kept their fans from using it to engage with young voters.
The Conservative Hype House, a group account for numerous right-wing content creators, has been uploading videos demonstrating an indentifying code assigned by the official Trump campaign – “CHH” – that allows users to join its text-alert service.
And around six days ago, a rival Democrat group started circulating Mr Biden’s rival SMS updates.
Polls suggest the large majority of American voters have already decided who to vote in November’s poll.
But TikTok provides a way to connect first-time voters less effectively in their views.
Unlike Google and Facebook, the platform doesn’t allow political campaigns.
But as long as no money changes minds, users can voice support for any presidential candidate – and funnel others towards their official campaigns.
Youthful audience
Both parties’ online approach is certainly focused more on Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube.
According to experts, TitkTok has the ability to reveal which campaign messages seem to resonate well with its youthful audience.
With 1.5 million followers, The Conservative Hype House is standing as the biggest political account on the app.
And during the past month, many of its videos have appealed users to download the Official Trump 2020 App, directing them to a link in the channel’s description rather than directly to Apply or Google’s app stores.
Two of the videos posted back in September, mocking Mr Biden, have gained more than 300,000 views and 50k likes.
When asked why the Democrat Hype House was not urging TikTok users to support Mr Biden’s campaign, one member replied: “This isn’t a very good answer but I think that it just never really occurred to us.”
And within a day it had posted a video directing its almost 152,000 followers to do just that – and download the campaign app.
