Can Joe Biden Win Over TikTok?

Inside the Hive’s Brian Stelter explores how Joe Biden’s campaign is embracing TikTok, speaking with Makena Kelly, a senior writer at Wired, and Harry Sisson, an NYU junior and TikTok political commentator. “I just talk about the news,” says Sisson, who doesn’t officially work for the Biden campaign, but with more than 800,000 followers on the platform, helps spread the president’s message. For instance, he says, he talks about what’s going on with Donald Trump’s “historic indictments” and “this very, very important campaign that we have going on.”

“It’s almost just like a new way of activism,” says Sisson, like “an interaction or a conversation you might be having at somebody’s front door that you’re now having on TikTok, as opposed to it being sanctioned by a campaign or something like that.”

“Harry has created an audience that trusts him,” says Kelly. “It could be an audience of young people, whoever, who see him as someone who reads the news, is tuned into the news, knows what people want to see, and then he is able [to] curate that and explain it to people.” With “so much information coming at us at any time,” she says, people are “looking for people like Harry, other people that we can trust online—influencers, content creators, et cetera—to provide us what it is that we need.”

Kelly wrote this week how the Biden campaign trolled conspiracy theorists on TikTok who saw the Kansas City Chiefs ascent as part of a plot for Taylor Swift to endorse the president after the Super Bowl. “I think Democrats of the past, even the Biden campaign, have traditionally ignored that stuff, and it’s been allowed to fester online,” says Kelly. But the Biden campaign is getting more aggressive, she says, and “creating the TikTok and engaging with this conspiracy theory, just recognizing that it exists and playing into it, just kind of makes it fall apart.”