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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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TikTok was flooded with positive content about Vice President Kamala Harris following President Joe Biden's announcement that he was exiting the presidential race, a report shows.
More than 85,000 videos about Harris have been posted to the social media app since Biden said on July 21 that he would step aside and endorse Harris as the Democratic nominee, according to the Zelf Political Report released Monday.
Zelf, a TikTok listening and analytics platform, found that most of these posts were positive, giving Harris a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +49 percent.
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Harris launched her personal TikTok account on Thursday. Since joining the app, the vice president's four posts have received over 81 million views and 9.6 million likes. She has also racked up 3.2 million followers. The decision to join TikTok comes as Harris has spurred recent viral trends, like a coconut tree meme and references to the Charli XCX album Brat.
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James Haggerty, CEO of strategic communications company PRCG, previously told Newsweek, "2024 will be the TikTok election."
A Pew Research Center analysis last November found that in just three years, the share of Americans who regularly get news from TikTok has quadrupled, from 3 percent in 2020 to 14 percent in 2023. Young people are especially likely to use the platform as a news source, with about a third reporting that they use TikTok for news.
As of March 21, TikTok boasts 150 million active users in the U.S. More than 4 in 10 U.S. users say they regularly get news on the site, according to Pew, jumping double digits from 33 percent in 2022 to 43 percent in 2023.
"Our job as a campaign is to break through the noise and make sure we're talking to voters wherever they are — TikTok is one of those landscapes, and we're leaving no stone unturned," Harris' deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, said last Thursday in a statement.
The new report said Harris' recent boost is comparable to the one former President Donald Trump saw after the July 13 assassination attempt. Trump-related videos increased almost eightfold in the week after a sniper opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. TikToks about Trump skyrocketed from 1 billion to 6 billion between July 13 and 20.
"Trump's assassination attempt was the biggest bump in content that Zelf has seen, so there was more content about Trump after that than there is now about Harris," Zelf CEO and co-founder Pepijn van Kesteren told Newsweek. "However, relatively speaking, the content about Harris is more positive than it was for Trump."
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The content had a tremendously positive impact on Trump's NPS score. The former president had a -24 percent NPS for months, but his NPS surged to +35 percent in the week after the shooting, Zelf found. The boost, however, was short-lived, falling to -5 percent after the seven days following the shooting.
Trump joined TikTok earlier this year, launching his account last month with a 13-second video in which UFC President Dana White declares, "The president is now on TikTok." His seven videos have been viewed more than 493 million times collectively, with 24.8 million likes. Trump has 9.3 million TikTok followers.
The Zelf report found that it was not only Harris who benefited on TikTok from Biden's recent announcement. The president also was able to improve his NPS since leaving the presidential race. The report noted that the main driver of negative Biden content was his ability to serve a second term.
The report was conducted through a comprehensive assessment of 153,300 TikTok videos from June 27 to July 26.
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