If you’ve opened up TikTok in the last month, chances are you’ve wondered why your feed looks like a coconut tree-riddled Hawaiian Island. In the month before, you may have been bombarded by AI-generated images of an embracing Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

TikTok is a distinctive sea. Gen Z — the generation born from around 1995 to 2010, currently teenagers and young adults — makes up 60% of TikTok’s 1.1 billion users. But just as the ocean tides can push around a ship that thinks it’s still sailing on its own, TikTok influences Gen-Z users more than they know.

In recent years, politicians have begun to catch on to TikTok’s potency. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who is much younger than her predecessor Joe Biden, or their Republican rival Donald Trump, seems to understand the power of the video app better than most. But, to understand this digital sorcery, the contenders of this November’s US presidential election must understand the platform’s unorthodox content. 

Political dismay

In the 2020 presidential election, a record-breaking number of young people voted. Based on recent registration numbers, youth turnout this year seems poised to be near that of 2020. However, it was only two months ago that many young people were distancing themselves from the ballot boxes. They disliked both presidential candidates; both were, to put it simply, old. They were “stuck in a political Groundhog Day,” as Erica Pandey at Axios said, and saw national politics as a rusted establishment. Confidence in the nation’s institutions has plummeted among younger Americans. Like many Iranians, young people saw no point in voting in the presidential election. There was a sort of nihilistic apostasy among young people from both candidates and the political system at large. “Youth perception towards politics [was] a combination of disinterest and disgust,” Richard Fox, a professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University, told me. 

Young people decided to turn their noses up at their electoral power simply because neither the government nor its politicians had a “magic wand to end the suffering,” as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin describes.

In classic Gen-Z fashion, young people took to the Internet and flooded TikTok with satirical political content.

Coping with humor, celebrity culture and moral standards

“If you had to pick a Democrat or a Republican, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, gun to your head, who would you vote for?” “The gun would go off.” This back-and-forth (posted by Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, an American political comedy duo that has amassed 2.2 million followers on TikTok) was viewed over 27 million times. The clip took on another life as an additional 25,000 original videos were made reusing its audio track, spreading it across the internet.

Cut to video: “Late at night I toss and I turn” — insert Biden and Trump photos — “and I dream of what I need. I need a hero” — insert photos of Sue Sylvester from the series Glee or of the media personality Kid President. For young people, Bonnie Tyler’s song “Holding Out for a Hero” perfectly mirrored their political predicament. 

Generated with Craiyon.

And then — kickstarted by the worrying and almost comedic presidential debate at the end of June — there was the advent of “Triden,” the romantic pairing of Trump and Biden. Thousands of young people posted videos, often set to popstar Chappell Roan’s song “Casual,” portraying the two political rivals as lovers. These videos featured AI-generated images of the two men shaking hands, hugging and playing golf. One user, @diorgr6ande, partook in the trend by splicing together AI voice impersonations of Trump and Biden: “They want to take us away from each other, but I won’t let them. Joey, I love you,” declared AI-Trump. “I know you never meant to say anything mean about me, Donny. Maybe in another lifetime, we could be together,” replied AI-Biden. The video got over 10 million views. One user commented, “I love my generation.”

“It was like a form of coping,” Mebby, a 19-year-old part-time TikToker studying communications and film and media studies at Saint Louis University, told me. 

To much of the youth, the political motif of Chappell Roan’s artistry represents all that they stand for. During her performance at the Governors Ball Music Festival in June, she stated, “This is a response to the White House, who asked me to perform for Pride. We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.” 

When politicians fail to satisfy the youth’s hunger for justice, the youth forsake the government and seek refuge in their own generation and the reverie of idealism. While these high moral standards are admirable, young people risk losing sight of progress and pragmatism in the pursuit of political perfection. The heart of democratic politics is compromise, but many young people are unwilling to “betray” their principles by voting for an imperfect candidate. 

The TikTok echo chamber

TikTok works by algorithm, tailoring a user’s feed based on videos the user has interacted with. After the algorithm has done its dirty work, a user will be fed a stream of agreeable, accommodating content, their “own personal self-affirmation chamber,” as Vox’s Christian Paz described it.

“TikTok is … likely part of a new echo chamber as the algorithms being applied deliver ideologically compatible content to TikTok users,” Richard Fox and Kiani Karimi wrote in a recent study that surveyed a large sample of 18- to 25-year-olds to explore TikTok’s political influence. If a user engages with satirical political content, their echo chamber will spit like content relentlessly back at them. The Biden-Trump memes were “discrediting the [political] process,” Fox told me. And how can one not be influenced by such an endless stream of cynicism? 

“People are consumed by what they see on social media and think it’s the world around them,” Mebby told me. 

If a young person is trapped in a sphere of political fantasy and incredulity, they will lose sight of reality and inevitably lose any motivation to vote. If not outright, TikTok’s influence is subliminal, rooted in conditioning through repetition — we are what we eat, we are what we behold. 

The 2024 Harvard Kennedy School Survey of young Americans’ attitudes towards politics and public service reports that 62% of 18- to 29-year-olds nationwide disapprove of the government’s performance and that 73% use social media platforms to stay informed. These same people dominate social media platforms. In consequence, young people are staying informed through the same apps on which their generation is perpetuating a negative view of the government. 

“When these people that they consider to be “real,” that they consider to be truthful and honest, tell stories of certain government acts, people feel empathy for them and therefore see the government as the enemy,” Mebby told me.

But can TikTok be a force for good?

And suddenly, Biden dropped out. Like a phoenix, Kamala Harris rose. TikTok was the wind beneath her wings. A new hysteria overtook the platform, but this time the digital commotion was not nihilistic — it was hopeful. As young people processed the news of Kamala’s candidacy, she became a heroine of high-octane Gen-Z culture. 

Kamala became “Brat,” the trend of the summer, an online delirium named for popstar Charli XCX’s new album, Brat. Even Charli herself endorsed Kamala as a Brat-figurehead, posting on X, “kamala IS brat.” The Harris campaign’s official social media embraced the Gen-Z typhoon, rebranding in Brat’s signature lurid green color.

One year earlier, in May 2023, when giving remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony, Kamala laughingly spoke some words that Gen Z will never forget: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” And luckily for Kamala, the internet never forgets. These seemingly cryptic, pseudo-philosophical words fit into the TikTok meme machine like lock and key. “Coconuts” and “context” entered the Gen-Z vocabulary. 

When Kamala became the presumptive Democratic nominee, her words came back not to haunt her, but to supercharge her. Young people mixed coconuts and context with Brat and got to work. They spliced Kamala’s iconic words into “Apple” by Charli XCX, “Blow” by Kesha and “Look What You Made Me Do,” by Taylor Swift — three singers representative of female power. Kamala HQ caught on quickly, subtitling its social media pages with the words “Providing context.” 

Chappell Roan made her way back into the fray as young people used her song “Femininomenon” to celebrate Kamala’s candidacy. These same young people, who only days earlier had used Roan’s music to mock the government, were now invested in the election. One user, @cattakespics, posted a video set to a Charli XCX-coconut mashup prophesying: “All of Gen Z pulling up to the voting booths with nothing but this audio in their heads as they single-handedly elect the first female president of the United States.” It was bombs away. In the days just after Kamala’s emergence, tens of thousands registered to vote. More than four-fifths of them were between 18 and 34 years old. 

The making of memes and organicness

What was so effective about these memes?

For starters, they came about organically. “It was regular, random people finding the things that they cared about already and mashing it together. It was not top down, it was bottom up — and that is so important to meme culture,” said @organizer, a pro-Harris influencer.

If political campaigns push content too hard, young people may feel coerced by what they scorn as efforts from the “out-of-touch” and “cringe” older generation. The memes must be coming from young people so they feel as if they are in control. Furthermore, they then become empowered as the mobilizers and not just the mobilized. 

In a phenomenon called the “social vote,” people are more likely to vote when they perceive that their social networks and friends expect them to vote. Due to the personal nature of TikTok’s content, users may psychologically classify complete strangers on the For You Page as friends. Another, soon-to-be released study finds that social media and friends, more than any other factors, have the most influence on political beliefs.

“I think the most interesting thing about social media is shared human experience,” Mebby told me. “Real people have a major impact.”

Kamala Harris got lucky. The seeds of her coconut meme-wave had already been planted in social media, so when she took over for Biden, young people on TikTok knew what to do with her. “Candidates have always attempted to stage this kind of virality … but the moments that truly take off lock into the absurdist, chaotic energy of the internet and are almost impossible to predict,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings.

In 2020, ultra-influencers — such as Charli D’Amelio, with over 100 million followers — ruled TikTok. Now, the app has a more lived-in feel. It is characterized by multitudes of everyday users turned creators. 83% of TikTok users have posted a video. The most valuable advocate on TikTok is the ordinary user. Campaigners must recruit these users and use them like sleeper agents; they can flood the platform with seemingly authentic videos until other users market the candidate of their own free will — until the content catches on like a prairie fire. 

“What this all amounts to is a viral marketing stunt that any presidential candidate would pay millions for, but one that no strategist or ad agency could create,” Jennings concluded. “It’s all entirely organic, forged from the fires of a truly bizarre and unpredictable time.” 

What bones to throw?

To create a Gen-Z trend, one must understand that TikTok is a place where young people go to keep things that are theirs and only theirs, things their elders would not understand. It must deviate from mainstream culture, because TikTok, if anything, is an avenue for young people to assert their own, unorthodox cultural identity. It should be idiosyncratic, atypical and avant-garde. It should be jarring, discordant and unmistakable. 

And if you can get something like that, something like Brat, associated with a political candidate — Gen Z will listen. 

“I feel like, for so, so long, people were always under this impression that anything political couldn’t be fun or entertaining,” Cathryn Kuczynski, a 20-year-old UCLA student, told me. Ioana Literat, the TikTok researcher from Columbia’s Teachers College, told Vox, “The idea that political expression should be serious and based on facts and rationality — when we look at TikTok political content, it looks almost the opposite of that.”

Maybe fun — and joy — is exactly what politics needs.

In any case, fun and joy certainly seem to be working for Kamala Harris.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.