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Whether 2024 was the UK’s first “TikTok election” or not, the next one will definitely be. Some politicians, including Nigel Farage, have garnered significant support on the platform. All major UK political parties are on the app. They have no choice. TikTok is the social media platform of choice for today’s young voters and their main cultural exploration. But TikTok also has its own biases. As Marshall McLuhan first said about television, “the medium is the message.” We learn as much about a culture from its technological medium as its actual content. This means that politics on TikTok will be very different from what’s come before.
In his 1985 book, Fun to Die, American media theorist Neil Postman, a disciple of McLuhan, described a cultural shift he called “This is it,” after the phrase television newscasters would use to herald the shift from humanitarian disasters to upbeat human interest stories. This rapid-fire news smorgasbord taught viewers that “the world is without order or meaning, and should not be taken seriously.” An explosion in a faraway land might provoke an immediate emotional response, but it would ultimately be worthless if it were quickly zeroed in on by reports of a celebrity wedding or the birth of an exotic animal. Sprinkled with advertising, even the most serious world events would seem “without consequence or value.”
Postman died in 2003, but he functions as an artful Cassandra for the TikTok era. TikTok, which switches automatically from short video to short video, is the logical outcome of the lightning-fast “now and now” effect. The regulated scheduling system of traditional television disappears entirely. BBC News at Ten airs for 30 minutes and then it’s over. On TikTok, the only theoretical obstacle to true infinite scrolling is your phone’s battery life. Events are as valuable and important to the world at large as individual users say they are. Amnesia happens at will.
There are no verbal cues to prepare users for the shift in tone or content. By downloading TikTok, you consent to constant emotional upheaval. Sometimes the upheaval begins without any permission at all, as Instagram users experienced in 2022, when the photo-sharing platform was suddenly flooded with TikTok-esque “reels.” Online protests were ineffective, and the app remains flooded with short-form video content. This is how we absorb information now, say tech companies that make money off an ad-friendly medium, whatever the message. Get used to it.
TikTok users produce videos about politics and humanitarian issues, but they chaotically mix them with consumer marketing, craft tutorials, attempts at “edutainment,” comedy sketches, baby animal videos, and virtually every other genre of short-form “content.” Sometimes two or three videos appear stacked together, an attention-grabbing tactic disparagingly called “sludge content.” Social media managers may have an idea of their target audience, but they can’t ensure their message gets across seamlessly. In other words, there’s no way to stop a Liberal Democrat campaign ad from appearing before a video of Ed Davey falling off a paddleboard.
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The most sinister effects of the short-form video wave are seen when trying to tell a story that relies on a consistent beginning, middle, and end. This is especially unfortunate in the world of politics. Political campaigners still rely on voters who see history longitudinally and chronologically. Parties win votes by appealing to shared memories of the past. This nostalgic turn has given rise to some of the most successful slogans in the pre-COVID and TikTok period, such as “Make America Healthy Again” and “Take Back Control.” Rishi Sunak’s Conservative manifesto similarly begins with “We are restoring economic stability after COVID and the Ukraine crisis” and that Labour wants to “rebuild the country” after 14 years of Conservative rule. But the youngest voters in this election are those who were three years old during the final days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Politicians are trying to dredge up memories of those who weren’t there.
These same viewers are tethered to media formats that are hardwired to prevent communal memories from being created. Neil Postman has been very pessimistic about television. But while traditional broadcast news may jump inexplicably from story to story, it is still perfectly capable of turning blank moments into history. As events repeat and pile up over the years, we strengthen our sense of a common narrative. Consider the search for Madeleine McCann, which started as a number of Now This segments but became national news. Or last year’s Ocean Gate disaster, in which a submersible carrying tourists to view the wreck of the Titanic imploded, garnering public attention perhaps because of its eerie similarity to the sinking 100 years ago. Human broadcasters understand the public imagination and the sources of their communal interest in ways that algorithms never can.
On TikTok, footage appears randomly and disappears in a vortex that seems to go on forever. Nothing is displayed in chronological order. The app has no incentive to provide cultural or historical context, nor does it have the infrastructure to support what some call “connective thinking”: the mental connection between an event and its distant consequences. Influencers have no way to make sense of the content of other users’ videos, so they can’t appeal to their audience’s reference points. When everyone in the social sphere is funneled into their own algorithmic pipeline, there are no big revelations or historically significant collective moments.
Political campaigns run through a flurry of short videos have no beginning or sense of accomplishment. Labour and the Conservatives may be able to use remnants of messaging from the pre-TikTok era now, but they are unlikely to gain the support of voters in five years’ time when the short video trend will command even more internet attention. As Postman puts it, politics is being reduced to a “nice appendage of show business.” Imagine Ed Davey falling into a lake over and over again. There will be catchy slogans and meme-worthy moments, but no enduring vision for the country’s future, much less a sense of a political past.
[See also: Jubilation from the French left on the streets of Paris]
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