By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on July 18, 2024
The right-wingization of contemporary society does not come out of nowhere. There are multiple variables that model this process, but a forced one points to the new social media that install the society of spectacle at a forced march. Just look at what happened on these platforms after the attack against Trump in Pennsylvania. The shot in the ear of the Republican candidate has reinforced the perception of specialists about TikTok as the main platform of the upcoming elections in the United States.
According to Cyabra, a company that monitors disinformation on the Internet, 49 percent of the content about the shooting on this social network encourages conspiracy theories. PeakMetrics, a cybersecurity firm that tracks online narratives, claims that mentions of Trump on social networks shot up to 17 times above the average daily amount following Saturday’s events.
Along with Instagram and Youtube, the “tiktoker” culture favors and protects everything that entertains and amuses, in all domains of social life and, for this reason, political campaigns and electoral contests are less and less a comparison of ideas and programs, and more and more advertising events and spectacles. Instead of persuading, candidates and parties try to seduce and excite, appealing to the lower passions or the most primitive instincts, to the irrational drives of the citizen rather than to his intelligence and reason.
TikTok, in particular, is perfect for infinite entertainment. Its world is the here, the now and hypervelocity. Sixty percent of its users are between 13 and 21 years old and were not born at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, nor did they live through Bush’s war on terror or the bursting of the real estate bubble in the United States. The fall of the Berlin Wall is ancient history. The past does not exist for millions of producers of videos that last between three and 15 seconds, and express themselves politically in a way that is very different from anything seen before.
Multiple studies point to the irruption, via digital, of the new right-wingers in the political scenarios, hand in hand with platforms that have adapted to reels (short videos in vertical format) and the war of memes. These new actors focus on the criticism of excessive state intervention, the demonization of progressivism and its self-perception as the “true right”, to which is added a decisive element to understand the configuration of these actors: political incorrectness.
This element not only functions as a binder of their discourses, but also allows them to incorporate new followers to their ranks, force common sense in reactionary senses and establish a clear dividing boundary between a “them” and an “us” that singles out the identity of those who “defend the values of freedom”.
Trump’s TikTok account, opened in June, has garnered nearly 20 million followers and 9 million “likes,” compared to approximately 6 million followers and 460 thousand “likes” for the campaign of Biden, who opened his channel in May. And this gap has only widened after the Pennsylvania shooting.
An analysis published by The New York Times called attention to the “Trumpification” of the platform, finding almost twice as many posts in favor of Trump: 1.29 million posts in favor of the Republican versus 651 thousand posts for the Democrat.
The great paradox of this story is that the platform, demonized in the United States for its Chinese origin and subjected to scrutiny and threats of closure by the administration of former President Trump and President Biden, is now critical to reach voters, especially young people, before November.
“If we allow Democrats, left-wing organizations and left-wing influencers to have a monopoly on the content that is produced on TikTok, we will lose the next generation of Americans,” said C. J. Pearson, a social media celebrity who co-chairs the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council.
The world according to Tiktok is “the society of the spectacle,” as imagined before the existence of the Internet by French philosopher Guy Debord. Spectacle is not only the power of the media, the hegemony of social networks or the trivialization of information and elections, but a much broader concept.
It refers to any situation in which the majority of people are condemned to passively contemplate others who live and decide for them in a time when representation replaces lived reality. And so it goes.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English