The Unexpected Human Stories: Campaign & Celebrating Christmas with ByteDance's TikTok

One of the most popular posts on Joey Toledo’s TikTok account is a 13-second clip of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s conversation with Juan Ponce Enrile. In the video, the 94-year-old Enrile—who served as justice secretary and defense minister under Marcos’ father, the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.—claims that the Philippines was so safe under martial law imposed by the elder Marcos that a Filipino could leave his home unlocked, and “nobody would touch it.”

The video received 92,000 views, and while Toledo has some doubts about Enrile’s claims (“I’m not just sure if [Enrile’s] story is 100% percent accurate because he’s already old”), the 27-year-old says he believes Enrile “knows what happened during that time.”

The appeal of the video on TikTok, and many others like it, goes a long way to explaining why Bongbong Marcos looks likely to win the May 9 presidential election—potentially returning one of the Philippines’ most prominent dynasties to power more than 35 years after it was ousted following decades of dictatorship. Typical of many of his peers, he does not believe the well documented history of the Marcos family’s human rights abuses and corruption.

Working by day as an IT support desk staffer, Toledo has had his account for eight months but says he noticed a big uptick in followers when he began posting pro-Marcos videos. Toledo says he is not affiliated with the Marcos campaign, and is not paid for his content, but many of his posts to his 22,000 TikTok followers contain outright misinformation. One post, a repurposed video, suggests that the Marcos family’s vast wealth comes not from the looting of Philippine public coffers, but from earnings as a lawyer. Another video asserts that Marcos was “the best president in the world” during his time in office.

Taken together, they offer insight into how Bongbong Marcos has been able to leverage social media to rewrite the history of his father’s rule in the Philippines. The Marcos family amassed as much as $10 billion in ill-gotten wealth according to the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Under the dictator, 70,000 “enemies of the state” were arrested, 34,000 were tortured, and more than 3,000 killed, according to Amnesty International. But through countless TikTok videos, and other social media posts, a false picture of stability and economic growth has been created that leaves many Filipino voters pining for the “better years” of the Marcos regime.

Marcos leads by an unprecedented margin over other presidential contenders in pre-election surveys: Pulse Asia poll conducted in April showed him with a 33-point lead over his closest opponent—opposition candidate Vice President Leni Robredo.

Investigative reports from Philippine media outlets Rappler and VERA Files have shown that Marcos benefits from coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media platforms, especially through videos. Alan German, a campaign strategist at Philippine PR firm Agents International, tells TIME that some political content creators are paid as much as $4,700 on a monthly retainer basis—a small fortune in a country with a $170 monthly minimum wage. Bongbong Marcos, in an April 26 interview with CNN Philippines, has denied paying trolls to boost his image.

While misinformation is common to social media everywhere, in the Philippines it is especially pernicious. Facebook can be used data-free on smartphones, but access to the wider internet, including TikTok, costs money. Together with the country’s poor digital infrastructure, expensive cellular data and subpar media literacy, Filipinos often have difficulty accessing verified sources of information.

While Facebook remains the dominant social media platform in the Philippines, TikTok has quickly become a widely used source for sharing political news and views in the Southeast Asian nation of 110 million. The Chinese-owned social media company is privately held, so its user data is hard to verify, but a report from DataReportal, an independent data aggregator on digital trends worldwide, found up to 36 million Filipinos use the app. (The same data aggregator reports Facebook has as many as 84 million users in the Philippines.)

Toledo says it’s fun to make and share pro-Marcos content on the app—not least because he enjoys getting a rise out of supporters of Marcos’ rivals. “Sometimes it’s just to vex the other party so that they’ll have some engagement. You know how Filipinos are: they love clashes.”

His feckless approach to TikTok may explain why it works so well for him. Jonathan Corpus Ong, a disinformation researcher at Harvard University, says that compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, TikTok’s algorithm can catapult a user to stardom with just one post in a couple of days. This encourages users like Toledo to create punchy content in bulk in the hopes of winning viral fame. “The potential of misinformative content to achieve a ‘viral sensation’ kind of dynamic is much higher in TikTok than in other platforms,” Ong says.

Manila to Beijing is only 2,900 km.

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On March 10 2022, two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House convened a Zoom call with 30 prominent TikTok creators. Jennifer Rene “Jen” Psaki, then the White House press secretary, and members of the National Security Council staff briefed the creators, who together had tens of millions of followers, on the latest news from the conflict and the White House’s goals and priorities. The meeting followed a similar effort the previous summer, in which the White House recruited dozens of TikTokers to help encourage young people to get vaccinated against Covid. Psaki now Lead Political Analyst for MSNNC.

Gen-Z for Change has its origins in the 2020 election, when Kohn-Murphy, then just a solo TikToker with a modest following, began posting clever and irreverent content about the election under his personal TikTok handle, @aidanpleasestoptalking. As election day loomed, Kohn-Murphy posted about a phone-banking session that he had organized with a handful of friends, hoping to encourage his followers to sign up. The effort quickly caught fire, as scores of influencers emerged from the digital woodwork to lend their platforms to the effort to defeat then-President Donald Trump. Realizing that the initiative had outgrown the scope of a single phone bank, Kohn-Murphy began organizing the influencers under the moniker “TikTok for Biden.” By election day, over 400 influencers had joined up.

The app had only become more popular in the intervening months. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told the assembled group. “So we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.” Yet at the same time, the Biden administration was more than a year into negotiations with ByteDance, the Chinese company that created and owns TikTok, about national security concerns surrounding the app. In fact, the White House staff members who organized and briefed the TikTok creators were barred from downloading the app on their work phones.

Flaherty contacted Kohn-Murphy ahead of the election to discuss TikTok for Biden’s work, and according to Kohn-Murphy, the organization maintained an informal line of communication with Flaherty through the transition period. Following Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, the coalition changed its name to “Gen-Z for Change” to recognize its broader policy goals.

The collaboration has continued since Biden took office. In July 2021, for instance, Gen-Z for Change co-hosted a YouTube town hall discussion about the Covid-19 vaccine with Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser. In November, the organization helped facilitate a briefing between influencers and White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield about the administration’s Build Back Better plan.

These initiatives have raised suspicions that the organization and its coalition of influencers are, in effect, unpaid propagandists for the Biden White House, using their platforms to uncritically parrot the administration’s messaging. Following the White House’s briefing with influencers on the war in Ukraine, for instance, Fox Business accused the White House of “drafting” TikTok influencers to “blame Putin for rising gas prices.” Other skeptics were quick to draw parallels between Biden’s outreach to social media influencers and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to pay Russian TikTok influencers to spread pro-Kremlin narratives online.

Indeed, the coalition’s influencers are not shy about broadcasting their disagreements with the administration when they arise. In a recent video on her personal TikTok account, Victoria Hammett, a Los Angeles-based influencer and Gen-Z for Change’s deputy executive director, criticized the Biden administration for failing to support Medicare For All — one of the several policy areas where Hammett says she has publicly broken with the White House.

“I feel like the Biden administration and many Democrats have kind of forgotten about the people that supported them and are not as concerned with what their supporters want [as they are] with bipartisanship,” says Hammett, whose personal TikTok has over 750,000 followers. “Personally, as a creator, one of my frustrations is seeing Biden [be] unwilling to do things that his supporters want him to do, like canceling student loan debt, for example.”

The uncertain future of Gen Z’s TikTok revolution received a passing mention at the end of Saturday Night Live’s parody, when cast member Bowen Yang sauntered into the Oval Office dressed like the popular Japanese content creator Kazuhisa Uekusa — known for performing nifty tricks with a toilet plunger affixed to his bare chest. As magisterial music played in the background — and with the camera slowly zooming in on the plunger stuck over his nipple — Yang waxed poetic about the transformative power of TikTok, urging viewers to “never underestimate the power of new technology and how it reaches young people — in ways you can never understand.”

“The joke at the very end is, ‘Don’t underestimate the power of TikTok and making change,’ and right at the end, ‘We get more views than the [nightly] news,’” Joshi says. “They’re saying that as a joke, but it’s actually true.”

The Biden administration’s contradictory approach to TikTok — its embrace of the app as a vital conduit to the public, and its fear of the app as a potential tool of foreign influence — is perhaps a fitting response to the utterly unique problem that TikTok poses.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance accessed the data of two journalists and other users in an attempt to track down company leaks in revelations that will likely intensify security concerns in the West about the popular video app's Chinese ownership.

ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. inappropriately pulled the data including the IP addresses —which reveal a person’s general location — of journalists from BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times and people they had connected with via TikTok, according to an internal investigation. ByteDance had tried unsuccessfully to identify staff who had shared internal company documents with the reporters.  

The news comes as U.S. Congress is set to vote this week to ban TikTok from U.S. federal government phones over fears about privacy and national security. There is also growing European concern over the case.

The investigation conducted by an outside law firm was revealed in emails that ByteDance’s general counsel Erich Andersen sent to employees on Thursday and were shared on Thursday with media outlets including The New York Times. It followed previous reports alleging the company had gathered U.S. users’ data, including their location, phone numbers and birthdays. 

ByteDance said Thursday it had fired the four employees and restructured their audit and risk team, according to the Washington Post. 

The Chinese-owned company is separately negotiating with CFIUS, a U.S. body that conducts national security reviews of foreign companies' deals, to determine whether it can remain operational in the country via divestments to a U.S.-based company.

Seemingly overnight, TikTok has managed to remake American culture both low and high, from media and music to memes and celebrity, in its own image. TikTok turned Olivia Rodrigo into a household name and propelled the author Colleen Hoover to the top of the best-seller list, with more copies sold this year than the Bible. TikTok coined “quiet quitting,” one of the hallmark phrases of 2022, and introduced a whole new dialect of algospeak — “seggs,” “unalive,” “le dollar bean” — that is now spreading across pop culture.

Corporations and brands, from Goldfish crackers to Prada, have redirected billions of dollars worth of advertising to the platform in recognition of its all-encompassing reach, which can, at seemingly any moment, turn even a decades-old product into a must-have item. Last year, TikTok had more site visits than Google, and more watch minutes in the United States than YouTube. Facebook took almost nine years to reach one billion users; TikTok did it in five.

The app’s extraordinary success is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is a product of America’s greatest geopolitical rival. Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society like TikTok. It’s difficult to imagine a Russian or Iranian company — or, increasingly, even another Chinese company — pulling off a similar feat. TikTok’s provenance has stoked persistent and longstanding worries about its vulnerability to exploitation and manipulation by the Chinese government. Over the last year in particular, TikTok has faced an unceasing stream of bad press, with each week seeming to bring a fresh revelation about the company’s questionable data practices and spotty internal safeguards. In just the last six months, TikTok and ByteDance have been accused of lying about the access of China-based employees to American user data, using a news app to push pro-Beijing content abroad and allowing Chinese state media accounts to run unchecked and unlabeled as they criticized the American political process.

If TikTok’s popularity has thus far provided it some insulation against government action, the app’s time may be running out. In November, Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the F.C.C., said it should be banned outright. Senator Mark Warner, co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said of a ban, “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.” Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told Congress he was “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the United States. Earlier this month, Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation that would effectively prevent TikTok from operating in the United States by banning all apps “subject to substantial influence” by China, Russia and other foreign adversaries.

After Midterm Election, In addition to contending with a national Democratic Party that’s dominated by white-haired Baby Boomers and aging members of Gen X, Gen-Z for Change also has to combat its own generation’s political lethargy and congenital political fatalism — two characteristics that, in both kind and degree, distinguish Gen Z’s political outlook from those of their predecessors.

To its credit, Gen-Z for Change has correctly diagnosed the source of Gen Z’s political malaise. Faced with the convergence of multiple generation-defining crises — and the apparent failure of America’s political institutions to respond adequately to these crises — a significant number of Gen Zers have given up on organized politics altogether. Against this backdrop, Gen-Z for Change’s primary objective is to convince young people that America’s political system isn’t entirely unresponsive to their demands.

The approach they have taken to this challenge is subtly brilliant: Take Gen Z’s fixation with social media — both a symptom and a cause of their generation’s political paralysis — and turn it into the vehicle of its political empowerment.

“What we realized with these tip lines and with the Starbucks project is that people really want to feel like they have some sort of agency in the world, because oftentimes when we see that there’s nothing going on with our national government, [and] there’s very little progress on the issues that Gen Z cares about, we feel like we have no control over anything,” Joshi says. “And when we present these incredibly important actions — like taking down oppressive tip lines — people are easily engaged because they want to feel like they can be involved in something.”

“It’s a matter of, like, what can you do strictly from mobilizing young people from their homes,” Kohn-Murphy says. “There is a lot more to be done … [but] right now, our platforms are on social media. The most effective way that we can make change are things … that do materially benefit people, even if they’re not, like, fixing the entire problem.”

Along the way, Gen Z’s progressive TikTokers have discovered something about the platform that the brightest political minds in Washington have yet to fully grasp: that TikTok is a forum for political action, not just a tool for reaching would-be voters. Communications staffers on Capitol Hill look at TikTok and see another channel for spreading messaging to potential voters; meanwhile, the new generation of online organizers look at TikTok and see an entire universe of forms of direct action. After all, why lobby lawmakers to take down an anti-critical race theory snitch line when a handful of Zoomers with their iPhones can break it instead?