A conversation with Charlie Warzel on Joe Biden’s foray into content creation
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The president of the United States is now on TikTok. Joe Biden’s campaign launched an account during the Super Bowl on Sunday, kicking things off with a post about the game captioned “lol hey guys.” I called my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers tech and internet culture, to discuss what the president is doing on the video platform, and how politicians face the same pressures as any other content creator.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Just Like Us
Lora Kelley: Why is the president on TikTok, and why now?
Charlie Warzel: One obvious reason is you just need to be where people are. That’s what presidential candidates do. It seems like Biden is throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. The internet is so much weirder and more fractured than it was in 2020. It is so much harder to not only attract attention, but to dictate and program media cycles.
On one level, Biden is trying to do fan service for people who really enjoy the “Dark Brandon” memes. He seems to be doing some light trolling of Trump. And then there seems to be a little bit of behind-the-scenes content for voters to get to know him.
But, broadly speaking, it’s still unclear what his lane is and what a presidential candidate is doing on a social network like TikTok, which is a very creative social network. TikTok is where you showcase the skill you have, or a kind of absurdist humor. The platform almost seems antithetical to campaigning.
Lora: The whole “Dark Brandon” dimension is so interesting to me. Is the president an extremely online content creator now?
Charlie: We all know that Joe Biden is not an edgelord, that he’s not terminally online or steeped in meme culture. It’s inherently inauthentic when he posts about memes.
But at the same time, the whole “Dark Brandon” thing is an important wink and nod, because it shows that the campaign is hyper-online. It shows that, no matter how detached from the internet Biden himself is, the campaign is aware.
I would be really interested to know if Biden understands the layers of the memes. Or if he’s just like: You crazy kids, do what you want to do. Make me look good.
Lora: As you said, Biden is not a very online guy, and may not seem all that well matched to the platform. What potential downsides do you see to him being on TikTok?
Charlie: There are a lot of downsides. The first one is just the nature of this election: A lot of people are already pretty firmly in their camps. Most who are going to see these posts on TikTok are going to be people who either love him or hate him.
If the goal of getting the TikTok account is so that a bunch of 21-year-olds who don’t pay any attention to politics start interacting with Biden stuff, it’s probably not going to have the effect that they want. The algorithm is not going to show political content from the president to people who aren’t interested.
Then there’s the whole authenticity bit. His captions are in lowercase, things like “lol hey guys.” That’s not how the president talks, right? It feels a little pandering, and it might rub people the wrong way or just make them think: No, you’re not cool.
Lora: Could the TikTok account become more useful to Biden as the campaign progresses?
Charlie: When I spoke with Keith Edwards, a political strategist, he explained that you need to have all of your accounts ready to capitalize on a big moment. Something might happen out on the campaign trail, some heartwarming unscripted moment with a voter, or an off-the-cuff remark to a Fox News reporter where Biden “claps back.” If you don’t have a TikTok account, you can’t blast these moments out and potentially go viral.
Lora: I came across the account last weekend during the Super Bowl, before it had a lot of followers or views. For someone as famous as the president to be worrying about whether content will go viral seems like a surprisingly vulnerable position to be in.
Charlie: When Edwards was explaining this to me, I realized: He’s just describing what it means to be a creator on the internet. All creators are workshopping content, hoping that something’s going to resonate with people.
Fundamentally, Joe Biden is just another one of those creators. Even he needs to always be posting and hopefully hitting the viral wave. I think that’s really telling about where the internet is going. Unless you’re Taylor Swift or MrBeast or maybe Elon Musk, there’s not a lot of people who can attract that kind of attention by posting something random. The president’s just like us.
Related:
On Navalny’s Death
Tom here, with a note about the apparent death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison camp at age 47. Navalny’s death is one of those events that seemed inevitable but still comes as a shock. Russian President Vladimir Putin always feared Navalny and tried to kill him by having him poisoned in 2020. When he was handed a 19-year stretch in prison, it was a de facto death sentence, but he continued to fight.
As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today: “Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country.” I hoped that somehow he could outlast the regime, but a Russian penal colony is a harsh life even for a healthy man, and Putin got the last word, at least for now.
This is a dark day, but on Friday evening in Russia, people were lining up to lay flowers at memorials, including one right in front of the secret-police headquarters in Moscow. The dictator in the Kremlin thinks he can outlast the democracies. Free people around the world must keep proving him wrong.
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Evening Read
Anchorage Fell in Love With a White Raven
By Ash Adams
Throughout the fall, a rare white raven breakfasted at a McDonald’s and lunched at a Wendy’s in Anchorage, Alaska. Photographs confirmed word-of-mouth reports; a Facebook group that now has more than 20,000 followers is regularly updated with the raven’s whereabouts. On a gray weekend day in November, the bird showed up on a dumpster near the Wendy’s, then on various lampposts, roofs, and snow mounds. Each time it moved, a small group of people followed.
Read the full article.
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Watch. The latest episode of Expats (out now on Prime Video) connects the privileged protagonists with a society they inhabit at a distance, Shirley Li writes.
Sing along. Jennifer Lopez’s new musical film, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story (out now on Prime Video) is meant to be her opus but falls short, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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