The use of Gen Z internet “influencers” seems to be a central plank of Joe Biden’s youth-outreach strategy. On the 2020 campaign trail, Biden’s team “hired a firm to assist with influencer outreach,” Recode reported in September 2020. The campaign’s “formula for working with these influencers” involved Biden sitting “at home, often in front of a plant-filled backdrop and a window, while the influencer asks him open-ended questions that allow [him] to talk off the cuff about any given topic. These interviews are often streamed on Instagram Live, but they also pop up on Facebook and YouTube.”
In office, that strategy has continued: “White House enlists army of social media influencers to promote COVID-19 vaccines,” declared an August 2021 Spectrum News headline. That included “dozens of Twitch streamers, YouTubers and TikTokers” who were recruited to aid “the White House as it tries [to] drum up vaccination numbers and combat the scourge of vaccine misinformation being spread on social media.” The vaccination-promotion influencer push included one particularly cringeworthy episode in which “the White House put out a TikTok video by comedian Benito Skinner (a.k.a., Benny Drama) that was intended to serve as a public-service announcement encouraging people to get vaccinated,” as Ingrid Chung wrote last summer. “In the video, a spoof of a White House intern’s day, the giddy Skinner bounces around the West Wing, exchanging wisecracks with White House press secretary Jen Psaki.” Fair warning — the now-infamous video is difficult to watch:
Now, I regret to inform you that the TikTokers are at it again. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House was briefing TikTok stars on . . . the war in Ukraine:
On Thursday afternoon, 30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed the influencers about the United States’ strategic goals in the region and answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.
The videos that have come out since are more or less what you’d expect — young TikTok stars are basically just reading White House press releases to their followers. This specific video has been doing the rounds online today:
The White House told the TikTok influencers who were invited on the zoom call to blame the high gas prices on Putin. pic.twitter.com/qBCEA6r2C7
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 14, 2022
It’s weird. The poor girl looks like she’s stuck in a hostage situation. Anyone who’s spent any time on TikTok — and if you haven’t, I promise it’s not worth your time — knows that most of these “influencers” basically got big by doing short, choreographed dances to music. To be candid, a lot of them aren’t even that good at dancing; they’re more or less famous for being attractive. These aren’t exactly foreign-policy experts that we’re dealing with here. That’s fine, of course — we live in a free country. Anyone who wants to share their opinion on politics has the right to do so. But the flip side of that freedom is that I have the right to make fun of a presidential administration that is using a bunch of teenagers to distribute its talking points. And I plan to exercise that right. Vigorously.