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Many battlegrounds will shape this election season, but none will be more vital than social media. The left is already gearing up, using TikTok as a weapon for their latest paid propaganda and disinformation campaigns. They’re thrilled with what they’re doing but terrified that conservatives might catch on and play the same game. And naturally, we should.

Leading this charge is a progressive PR firm called Vocal Media, which is working tirelessly (and spending freely) to put their propaganda front and center on TikTok, aiming to brainwash the minds of America’s youth on the popular Chinese platform. One thing we noticed is that Vocal Media sounds more like a political activist group than a PR firm — just sayin’…

Vice:

Picture, if you will, a panoply of TikToks, scrolling in a hypnotic stream before you. A disgusted Taylor Swift influencer in the fall of 2021, blaming then-Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s former company for buying Swift’s master tapes. A Tesla owner enthusing about how the bipartisan infrastructure deal could create more charging stations for electric vehicles. A single dad washing baby bottles in his kitchen and singing the praises of the expanded child tax credit championed by the Democrats and the Biden White House. A woman leaping off her couch in celebration of the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. An influencer asking her followers to sign a petition for Biden to protect Spirit Mountain, a sacred Native cultural site in southern Nevada.

All of these videos—you can view three at these links—have one thing in common, besides being slightly wooden in delivery: they were masterminded by an “influencer marketing partner” called Vocal Media, which specializes in “influencer campaigns” for progressive and nonprofit causes. Vocal has been training and paying influencers to promote their clients’ causes in a series of videos that are generally not marked as sponsored content. (The Swift video contained a logo for Vote Save America, a Crooked Media project promoting progressive voter outreach, which does at least suggest a partnership of some kind.) The videos, as a whole, appear to contravene the spirit—if not, the company insists, the letter—of TikTok’s rules about political advertising and the Federal Election Commission’s guidelines about sponsored political content online, which advise, “Virtually all paid political advertising on the internet must contain a full, clear, and conspicuous disclaimer on its face.” We know all this because someone at the communications firm Hone Strategies emailed me, asking if I wanted to write about Vocal and their influencer partners.

TikTok’s official stance on this underhanded, paid-for political propaganda is that it’s not allowed on their platform. But we’ve all seen how the White House has repeatedly used TikTok influencers to promote their twisted progressive policies, haven’t we? Yes, we have.

The Vice piece continues:

TikTok has been remarkably clear that partisan and political ads—and these are ads, in that people are being paid to promote something on behalf of a third party—are not OK, issuing a statement in October 2019, that read, in part, “[W]e will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level—including election-related ads, advocacy ads, or issue ads.” But an analysis from the Mozilla Foundation in 2021 found that influencers were easily skirting the ban, concluding that the company’s political ad policies are “easy to evade.”

“Our research found that several TikTok influencers in the United States who disseminate political messages on the platform are receiving payment or the promise of compensation from political organizations,” the report’s authors wrote. “In keeping with FTC guidelines, we define payment as any form of material compensation—financial compensation, complimentary gifts, or trips. Some of this funding could be characterized as ‘dark money’—political spending that aimed at influencing voters, but where the source of the money and/or the donor is not fully disclosed.”

The thing that troubles the folks at Vice the most isn’t the underhanded use of propaganda. No, what really worries them is the possibility of folks on the right figuring out what’s happening and starting their own campaign. If that happens, then they believe there will be a ‘problem’:

It’s easy to see how this specific loophole could be steamrolled through by someone with a lot of money hoping to promote less than benign or good-hearted causes. It’s also easy to see how all of this lines up with an emerging phenomenon: Even as progressive and Democratic-aligned organizations are increasingly interested in fighting “disinformation,”  progressive and Democratic-aligned organizations  are employing strategies, like covert paid ad campaigns, that would presumably be found distasteful or immoral—or described as disinformation—if utilized by someone from across the aisle. Anything that can be done to highlight the childhood tax credit or promote Ketanji Brown-Jackson can, after all, also very easily, be done to argue for expanded gun rights or to promote the record of Brett Kavanaugh.

As long as the left is controlling the narrative and driving the propaganda, everything seems right in their world, and their tactics are considered a-okay. But if the right takes a similar approach, it’s suddenly labeled as a “disinformation campaign” and a “threat to democracy.” You see how this game works, don’t you? It’s a strategy that’s been in play for a long time, yet we still haven’t figured out how to win or beat them at their own game. As we head into 2024, that needs to change. It’s time to take the gloves off and get a little dirty.

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