by Colin Kirkland
Source: www.mediapost.com, July 2024
Ever since President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, interest and positive sentiment around the vice president is sky high on TikTok. This is also the case for former President Donald Trump following the recent assassination attempt, a new report shows.
Zelf, a social analytics company, has used proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology typically reserved for brands’ customer insights to analyze 153,000 TikTok videos posted between June 27, 2024 and July 26, 2024, compiling its findings into the company’s first political report.
According to Zelf, more than 85,000 TikTok videos were posted about Harris after Biden announced he would no longer be running. The videos generated over 1.8 billion views, almost doubling the total number of TikTok videos posted about her during the previous year. In addition, the new posts showed 49% more engagements with positive content than with negative content, marking a major shift in how the public now sees Harris.
Since dropping out of the race on July 21, 2024, positive sentiment about President Biden has also increased substantially, with a large number of commenters supporting his decision.
“Harris’ boost is comparable to the boost that Trump received after the assassination attempt,” the report states, adding that the number of videos about Trump over the week follow the shooting increased almost eightfold, with 50,000 videos posted in the week prior to the attempt on his life to over 400,000 in the wake of the shooting.
In addition, views on Trump-related content skyrocketed from one billion to six billion during that week, noticeably increasing positive sentiment about the former President.
However, as Zelf makes clear, “the collective TikTok memory is short,” as Trump’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) — an assessment of how positive or negative discourse is about an individual, issue, or topic within a given time frame, weighted based on video engagement — has dropped significantly in the past week, along with the videos being posted about him.
“There are over 170 million TikTok users in the U.S. and many are using it to get their news and information about the election,” says Pepijn van Kesteren, CEO and co-founder of Zelf. “So to properly understand the 2024 presidential election, you must have an understanding of sentiment on TikTok.”
The report comes days after Harris premiered her official TikTok account. This demonstrates the social media app’s importance to presidential campaigns and candidates’ abilities to reach younger voters — a key goal for Harris, who has been running with Millennial and Gen-Z idle Charli XCX’s recent “Brat” summer shoutout to the vice president, in this year’s race.
In the first video she posted under her TikTok account, Harris says she has been on the For You Page recently — affirming the results found in Zelf’s study, and thought she’d “get on here myself.”
Ironically, the ByteDance-owned social media company still faces a potential ban in the U.S. for fears over its connection to the Chinese government, an issue that is publicly supported by President Joe Biden, who signed the law threatening its availability to the massive user base in this country.
