Vivek Ramaswamy joined TikTok’s rat-girl army yesterday, after Jake Paul, the former Vine star and current TikToker, convinced Ramaswamy that the Chinese Communist Party–controlled media platform could attract youth voters.
“Yes, kids under age 16 shouldn’t be using it, but the fact is that many young voters are and we’re not going to change this country without winning. We can’t just talk about the importance of the GOP ‘reaching young voters’ while hiding in our own echo chambers,” Ramaswamy said.
His stunt with Paul, a vile and outdated meme of an influencer, is pure publicity — clownish, at that. Ramaswamy’s TikTok isn’t a serious campaign strategy. Do politicians who film videos of themselves swaying next to viral stars ever stop to wonder: What am I doing here?
Candidates who avoid TikTok absolutely miss out on attracting hyper-online youth. But is there any evidence to prove that an active TikTok presence aids candidates more than a stubborn stance against the CCP-run platform would?
Former GOP Pennsylvania candidate Mehmet Oz ran the most popular senatorial TikTok account during his campaign. He amassed 1.2 million followers, and posted videos of himself dancing in the kitchen and criticizing his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman. Yet the youth still favored Fetterman, who had a measly 128,000 TikTok followers, by 70 percent. It might be different in a presidential election — Oz was already a popular figure, and his TikTok following no doubt expanded past Pennsylvania. But his million-plus follower surplus didn’t save him, not by a long shot.
Although Joe Biden has in the past teamed up with TikTok influencers to sway youth voters, staff officials were asked in 2020 to remove the app from work devices. Biden is now threatening a nationwide TikTok ban, and the president’s reelection campaign announced it would no longer have an official TikTok account because of national-security concerns.
Ramaswamy himself called TikTok content “digital fentanyl from China, flowing through our phones instead of the southern border.” He certainly doesn’t take seriously the security threat TikTok poses if, as he says, Jake Paul is the one who convinced him to hop on the platform. Can U.S. candidates trust a Chinese-run company with political content? More importantly, can the U.S. trust any candidate who answers “yes” to that question?