Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are using TikTok to reach Gen Z; CredoIQ: viral conservative content surpassed progressive content at the start of October
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
TikTok had already emerged as a meaningful discovery channel for younger adults: a survey found some Gen Z users began researching major news events there. Harris’s campaign had also built a dedicated Gen Z operation around @KamalaHQ and its viral moments, showing that campaign use was becoming organized rather than incidental.
This story adds a distribution question to that outreach race: both campaigns can publish into the same youth-facing channel, but the mix of content that becomes viral may not be politically neutral. That matters given TikTok’s earlier role in election-related misinformation controls and extremist recruitment concerns.
First-order effects
- Harris and Trump campaign teams must treat TikTok’s recommendation-driven reach as a core Gen Z communications channel, not simply a place to repost campaign clips.
- CredoIQ’s finding that conservative viral content led at the start of October gives the Trump-side ecosystem a potentially more favorable organic-content environment, while Harris’s team has to compete for attention within it.
Second-order effects
- Campaigns and aligned creators are likely to place greater weight on formats, posting cadence, and creator distribution that can earn recommendation-feed reach—building on the campaign’s dedicated Gen Z TikTok operation.
- The result raises the stakes for TikTok’s moderation and recommendation decisions, since the platform has previously acted against election-misinformation hashtags and its enforcement can shape what political content travels.
Third-order effects
- If political reach increasingly depends on recommendation feeds, campaign influence will shift further from follower lists and paid messaging toward platform-mediated discovery—a form of news discovery already used by some Gen Z adults.
- The durable policy issue is less whether campaigns use TikTok than whether platforms can explain and govern unequal amplification of political content without turning moderation into a partisan flashpoint.
The trend: Election campaigning is moving toward algorithmically mediated short-form video, where recommendation systems increasingly determine which political messages reach younger voters.