Leah Feiger: And I trust, baby.
Victoria Elliott: But if it happens, which bank will give him money after seeing what he did to Twitter?
Leah Feiger: However, if he tweets about it in the next week and a half, Tori, you’re going to have to buy me lunch.
Victoria Elliott: I don’t understand why this is my responsibility. I can settle on a coffee.
Leah Feiger: Completed. All right, let’s leave it at that. When we come back, we’ll cover all the political influencers working on presidential campaigns on TikTok.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to the WIRED Politics Lab. Around the same time the Senate passed the TikTok ban/divestment bill on Tuesday night, Team Biden released a TikTok. Makena, Tori, did you see that?
Victoria Elliott: Wild.
Makena Kelly: Yes we have got that.
Leah Feiger: Describe it to me.
Speaker: You stood strong with us and we will stand with you, sir.
Makena Kelly: It was just a clip from a workers’ meeting in March, but at the same time it had these cute little halo emojis, angel emojis.
Leah Feiger: It was very curated. His TikTok team knows what they’re doing.
Makena Kelly: And completely clueless about what was happening in the Senate.
Leah Feiger: How is that possible? I mean, Biden just signed this bill. Help me understand the context here.
Victoria Elliott: I think one of the big things is that the bill was embedded in a big foreign aid bill, and so a lot of the headlines revolve around the fact that we’re giving 60 billion to Ukraine, that the aid is going to Israel and Taiwan, and These are all major focuses of Biden’s program. He has been campaigning for months.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Victoria Elliott: Getting this Ukraine relief bill passed, and I think that’s realistically A, the focus of the administration, and B, what they would most like us all to focus on, which is, hey, this is a very ineffective Congress. In fact, it’s been a really unproductive Congress this term, and this is a big success on a really big campaign promise.
Makena Kelly: And remarkably, Biden didn’t mention TikTok at all in his statement last night, released immediately after the vote.
Leah Feiger: This can be seen from the fact that he then posted a TikTok, or that his campaign then posted a TikTok. What were the comments on the TikTok video?
Makena Kelly: The Biden campaign may have had no idea what was going on in the Senate, but their followers on TikTok did not.
Leah Feiger: Great.
Makena Kelly: If you go through all the comments it says: “Keep TikTok, prayer emoji. Keep TikTok, Joey.” It’s literally anything with a few random words like “Vote for Biden” or “Trump will save America” or whatever, but first and foremost it’s about “#KeepTikTok.”