now let's return to what's been our lead
story through the hour the build-up to
the u.s
election and now we're going to look at
tick-tock's role in it
as you may well know donald trump spent
the last few months threatening to shut
down tick-tock's u.s
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 it has 1.5 million
followers that makes it one of the
biggest political accounts on tick tock
and in mid-september it started
publishing videos directing
users to download the trump app and
encouraging them
to sign up to text alerts from the trump
campaign
and to do so using a special hype house
code have a look at this example
what did he say there's there's
well let's bring to uh sophia smith
gayler from bbc world service who has
this story
um hi sophia good to have you on the
program now that bespoke
code that we just saw in that video is
that the clue to perhaps some level of
coordination
yes you're right 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 campaign team
chhh is not goldi it's the acronym
for the conservative hype house and when
you text it in
it is a recognized code what does that
mean
that means there's something called a b
testing possibly going on within the
trump campaign and that's
marketing speak for testing which
messages
resonate best when a tick tock user
sees a video like that and decides to
text chh
into the campaign they're not only
giving the campaign their phone number
the campaign will then ask for their zip
code the campaign will know they're a
tick tock user this is micro targeting
very interesting stay with us or to look
next at this pro biden account it's
called
the biden digital coalition it's a tick
tock account run by volunteers who
describe themselves as
campaign adjacent we know the official
biden campaign has been in touch with
them and the video i'm about to show you
was
posted after the first presidential
debate it's since been viewed more than
12
million times
[Music]
now i know because i read your article
sophia that facebook and google will
take political advertising
tick tock won't but how strictly does it
monitor these slightly more informal
arrangements between campaigns
and campaign groups it's important to
highlight their informal because
we assume that they aren't paid if they
were paid that would be electioneering
not only electioneering 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 um post pro candidate content
on tick tock if they so
wish and if you take the biden digital
coalition they actually told me
that tick tock is giving them the
highest engagement out of all the
digital platforms they're on currently
that tells you how useful a platform it
can be for campaigns
to send out messaging that resonates
well with gen z
and that's interesting to me because i
always assume tick tock is a
with a 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 tic toc 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
for social justice i mean black lives
matter
mata absolutely catapulted on the
platform when they
served it up as a trend so it really has
become a home
for political opinion just as much as it
is for
dancing lip syncs and the rest
good to see you thank you very much for
sharing that story with us and if you
want more on it do go to
the bbc news website where you can get
sophia's analysis
in full plus of course much more
election coverage and if you don't
follow sphere on twitter
do that and you'll also get plenty more
on her work on tick tock and plenty else
besides
you