Name: US election 2020: TikTok gets pulled into the campaigns - BBC News
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T20:25:25.000Z
Duration: 4 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Now let's return to what's being our lead story through the hour, the build up to the U.

And now we're gonna look a tick tocks role in it.

As you may well know, Donald Trump spent the last few months threatening to shut down Tik Toks US business.

That hasn't happened, and it looks like, in fact, there's a coordinated effort on tick tock to support him.

This is the account of the pro trump Conservative Hype House account.

That makes it one of the biggest political accounts on TIC TAC On.

In mid September, it started publishing videos directing users to download the Trump app on encouraging them to sign up to text alerts from the Trump campaign on To Do So, using a special hype house code.

Well, let's bring Thio Severe Smith Gala from BBC World Service who has this story high, severe, Good to have you on the program Now.

That bespoke code that we just saw in that video is that the clue toe, perhaps some level of coordination.

So in order to text the Trump campaign, you need to do so with a recognized key code that will have been internally programmed by their text.

It's the acronym for the conservative Hype House, and when you text it in, it is a recognized code.

That means there's something called a B testing possibly going on within the Trump campaign.

Speak for testing, which messages resonate best.

When a Tic Tac user sees a video like that and decides to text CHH into the campaign, they're not only giving the campaign that their phone number, the campaign will then ask for their ZIP code.

The campaign will know they're a TIC tac user.

This is micro targeting very interesting.

Stay with us or look next at this pro Biden account.

It's a tic tac account run by volunteers.

You describe themselves as campaign adjacent.

We know the official Biden campaign has been in touch with them on the video about to show you was posted after the first presidential debate.

It since being viewed more than 12 million times.

Okay, now I know because I read your article severe that Facebook and Google will take political advertising.

But how strictly does it monitor the slightly more informal arrangements between campaigns on campaign groups?

It's important to highlight their informal because we assume that they aren't paid.

If they were paid, that would be election nearing not only election hearing it would violate ticktock community guidelines, which expressed that paid political advertising is not allowed on the app.

But exactly like you say, grassroots organizations and voluntary groups can freely post pro candidate content on TIC tac if they so wish.

And if you take the binding Digital Coalition, they actually told me that Tic Tac is giving them the highest engagement out of all the digital platforms.

Their own currently, that tells you how useful a platform it can be for campaigns sent out messaging that resonates well with Jay Z, And that's interesting to me because I always assumed tick talk with It's a place where you go to escape politics to escape life.

It's this creative space, not a political space.

That's what Ticktock would like you to think in a lot of their company messaging.

They say we are a home for light hearted entertainment, but over the last year, they've become a real home for self expression.

I mean, black lives matter, matter matter, absolutely catapulted on the platform when they served it up is a trend.

So it really has become a home political opinion just as much as it is for dancing.

Thank you very much for sharing that story with us.

And if you want more on it, do you go to the BBC news website where you can get Sofia's analysis in full?

 Plus, of course, much more election coverage. 