TikTok's algorithm exhibited pro-Republican bias during 2024 presidential race | Hacker News Reader

TikTok's algorithm exhibited pro-Republican bias during 2024 presidential race

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136 pointserentz102 comments

It's another sock puppet study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17831

Very similar methodology to an earlier study the government cited in their case against TikTok: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

There are a number of issues with these studies, one being that the way the sock puppet bots interact with content is not exactly organic. Typically they search for content in a conditioning phase, followed by random scrolling during which the recommended videos are collected and classified by an LLM. Modern recommendation algorithms famously work by examining how long and how users engage with content, and there's none of that going on here. Still, the methodology itself and the use of LLMs to classify content is clever and probably about the best we can get.

Also, even if there _is_ a bias, it doesn't tell us why. Are the recommendations intentionally spiked, or is this simply the recommendation strategy that maximizes profit? (Or that the recommendation model thinks will maximize profit?) It's very difficult to tell, which is part of what makes these models dangerous and also part of what makes them difficult to regulate.

On a sidenote, TikTok (and presumably other content platforms) _really_ does not like these studies, as demonstrated by them nerfing search functionality after the second study above was released to prevent researchers using these techniques in the future. I haven't read the study in detail yet, but it will be interesting to see how the team at NYU Abu Dhabi adapted their methodology.

While I am skeptical of what reasonable conclusions can be drawn from a study like this, they explain the methodology in the article. You said:

>Typically [...] followed by random scrolling during which the recommended videos are collected and classified [...] Modern recommendation algorithms famously work by examining how long and how users engage with content, and there's none of that going on here.

But they claim that videos are watched, not just collected from the recommendation page.

"The accounts watched 10 videos, followed by a one-hour pause, and repeated this process for six days"

Perhaps I should have been more clear. It's TikTok, so of course the only way to collect recommendations is to watch videos. Some studies watch the whole video, some just watch part of it, but it's TikTok, so fundamentally you're watching a video.

I might just not be reading it properly. I've never used TikTok, I assumed by your description that they scraped video titles/transcripts/etc. from the recommendation page without any engagement on the video. (I suppose I should read the study you linked!)

When you say "how users engage with content, and there's none of that going on here", by "none of that", do you just mean likes/comments, that sort of thing?

I would usually consider watching as engaging with content, but if you mean additional engagement (as I would call it, anyways), that would make a lot more sense to me.

I think the key metric missing here is how long the user watches each video. Likes and replies are probably helpful too, but when I've used short-form video content apps like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts before, they've gotten a pretty good measure of me without me ever liking, replying, or following.

With the current methodology, the bot either watches the whole video, a fixed duration of it, or a random duration before swiping. The bot doesn't organically watch or swipe based on its interests like a human user would.

> Also, even if there _is_ a bias, it doesn't tell us why

Because that is a political discussion that will inevitably derail the point.

If there is identified bias then the platform must address it. Or it should be labelled a national security threat.

The problem is that the algorithms are programed to show people what they want to see OR what the platform want's you to see.

If it's orgasmic then this is no different than any other form of organic popularity. Seeing as Trump won the popular vote and the electoral collage, people were interested in republican content. On the same token it's very easy to AstroTurf and claim it was organic. From my personal conversations in meat-space I lean organic.

Is there funny business going on? Absolutely, all the time everywhere in every way. Can we say this was funny business? Not without the code.

TLDR: Popularity algorithms push popular content algorithmically.

> TLDR: Popularity algorithms push popular content algorithmically

Not aware of any major platform that solely uses a popularity algorithm.

I think this is a valid point and a really interesting question. If that's the standard, we need to regulate all recommendation algorithms. (i.e. put limits on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube as well.)

How could we regulate this? I can think of two ways:

- Results-based enforcement. i.e., companies are free to use whatever recommendation model they like, but have to recommend content within ideological bounds. i.e., you can't bias toward one partisanship more than X%. There's some precedent for this with the equal-time rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule) and FCC fairness doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine).

- Algorithm-based enforcement. i.e., there are limits on the algorithm itself. Perhaps you have to present your algorithm to a government agency and provide a proof that it obeys certain properties. But the enforcement here is analytical rather than empirical.

> Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube

Can you provide research for each of these.

Otherwise it's just muddying the waters to act like the bias is inherent to all platforms.

People do these same sock puppet studies on Twitter/YouTube/etc. and find biases there as well. There's a lot of literature out there.

Here's a recent study on YouTube from the same author as this TikTok study finding left-leaning bias in US recommendations: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/8/pgad264/72424....

Here's a somewhat older study from Twitter itself where they determined that their recommendations were biased toward right-leaning accounts: https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter....

IMO the interesting question is not whether an individual platform is biased and what its biases are, but rather how we might regulate recommendations given that there is always a risk of bias.

Weird to say but could be a relevant anecdote, as a trans person, that avoids politics in my socials but watches trans creators. I've never gotten a platform that doesn't show me the trans negative politics in my feeds after engaging with trans creators. I find I only get the positive politics AFTER I ignore or dislike the negatives ones.

the community doesn't help by trying to dunk on the anti trans stuff a little too much but I do assume it's engagement bait

I'd say with the reverse being very true as well would largely just make it so once you get anything close to touching the topic it tosses out which ever side they think you'll engage with the most.

For more anecdotal context, my other interests lean into a demographic/stereotype of an upper middle class pilates/health/cleangirl girliepop. Which from my experience they centrist/ambivalent maybe skew left but not inherently pro trans.

> For more anecdotal context, my other interests lean into a demographic/stereotype of an upper middle class pilates/health/cleangirl girliepop. Which from my experience they centrist/ambivalent maybe skew left but not inherently pro trans.

I'm not sure this is accurate, speaking as someone whose social circle has a lot of people in that group and who also sometimes ends up on that side of the algo. For various reasons, it's only socially acceptable to be outspokenly on the left in that group (more so for women over the age of 25/30), but there's a sizable minority who either disagree with certain topics or are more aligned with the right, but they aren't going to jeopardize their social circles or (particularly in the case of content creators) their audience.

It's the girl version of the men who put 'apolitical' on dating apps to hide being a conservative because they don't want to limit their dating prospects.

I agree and disagree! To clarify, when I say centre/centre left I mean neoliberal and left being more aoc/burny leaning. It is very acceptable to neoliberal, but often not worth the political risk to go further than that and vice versa. Neoliberal isn't inherently protrans, and in general people see trans people in two ways, example for trans women a different type of male(biology) vs a different type of woman(social construct). Where depending on their ideology and their view as mentioned, it determines what trans issues they will come to bat and risk talking about.

Yeah, we're talking within the general Overton window. Views that are outside of that (and particularly outside a binary) aren't going to do well with the algorithm. (It's interesting to me that you instinctually divide the views on trans people into a binary!)

There are just a lot more secret conservatives in that group than one might expect from outward appearances. The center of the Overton Window is as far 'right' as they can go without losing their audience. I can usually pick up on it pretty clearly, but I also worked in political communications for a while and became very sensitive to signaling and find it a fascinating topic. I wouldn't be shocked if the algorithm picks up on the association and assumes some similarity between down-low conservatives and forthright conservatives and starts serving the latter to viewers of the former.

> I've never gotten a platform that doesn't show me the trans negative politics in my feeds after engaging with trans creators.

How about Mastodon or Bluesky?

Haven't tried, I got off twitter and insta 2 years ago. I've been meaning to try it but its often hard to build up a feed again on one of those platforms it often just feels empty or if you don't follow the right people cluttered.

Anti-trans bias is often just lookism, since many conservatives who purport to hate trans people are more than happy to engage with those who "pass".

Consider 4chans fascination and fetishization of "femboys" and even this whole hilarious "saga": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/favela-trans-girl-saga

This is the same "conservative gen Z" group that somehow helps get trump elected with the Q shit...

Many of them just hate non-passing trans people. Sad but true, and a lot of trans people also dislike other non passing trans people.

100% I started not passing then lost a ton of weight and found out I have alot of traditionally feminine interests. I went from being spat at in the street and almost attacked with no help, to people going out of their way to protect me from creepy men following me.

From my experience passing, how attractive you are, and your interests/hobbies are all attached to how well you a treated in the world right now.

Trans people call it passing privilege for a reason.

> From my experience passing, how attractive you are, and your interests/hobbies are all attached to how well you a treated in the world right now.

That's always been true for anyone in just about any context.

True but I think it's out of touch to not see the trans part as effecting the severity factor to it. Like some of the first advice most trans women get only wear shoes you can run in. Where in my experience if you aren't enough of those three you'll get chased down and no one will care to help.

I only started dressing as a woman again after I couldn't pass as a guy anymore and learned how to be as attractive as I could be. Which is a common experience amongst trans women

I don’t doubt the severity of the trans experience.

I'd be inclined to think it's because trans people are more likely to engage with anti-trans posts.

I'm a cis lesbian and I only get pro-trans content, BUT I do get a lot of 'random bisexuals shitting on lesbians' content.

I've also noticed that when I scroll away from political posts from the left, it almost immediately tries to give me political posts from the right. The algorithm doesn't seem to pick up that my main concern with political content is whether or not it's FUNNY. The only political content I want to see on TikTok is shitposts, but the algo seems to operate under a pretty basic 'If scroll past left/right, then show right/left'.

Yeah, I doubt that there are enough tags or categories for the algorithm to use.

Big brush, broad strokes.

I think if the algo showed alot of ED triggering content to ED survivors as well then I'd be more likely to agree thats the primary driver and not just an influence.

I'm not sure but anti-trans content/socializing in general is primarily a driver for poor mental health with trans people. Not engaging and blocking a lot of the content is day 1 advice in the community. Also, a lot of anti-trans content is targeting non-passing trans people, which is often full of ways to trigger ones dysphoria and dysmorphia. Like there are keyboard warriors for sure but i don't know anyone that intentionally watches that stuff and most even avoid tiktok entirely because of it

And I'm skeptical it even identifies me as trans if i'm just watching a few trans people that aren't talking about trans issues or experiences really. Where i scroll past much more xyz issue that affects females in particular, when it's trying to diagnosis me (which i think is cause of my health/nutrition interest it trys to convince me xyz is cause i'm not balancing my hormones or its pocs or assumes my period is terrible lol)

Not that I think TikTok is particularly spotless but this sounds like the result of an algorithm learning what groups will engage with, ie democratic leaning accounts were more likely to do _something_ with republican content than vice versa.

This is interesting but I still think we have some responsibility here. What if most people hold some view in a low-grade kind of way but algorithms like this could accidentally (or intentionally) amplify it to the point of genocide. The story of Rwanda is well known and we can imagine it being much worse if we're not careful with this kind of technology.

Yeah. I remember Facebook used to appear to show me more of certain stuff that annoyed me (not political stuff so much as scammy stuff) because I hovered or even reported it. The most naive and high-level keyword based association is going to link both pro and anti trans stuff as the same general category too (another Facebook thing was the massive overlap between history and really dumb "alternative history")

Does this means republicans did better propaganda than democrats?

The title here is deceptive and I'm not sure the study authors did a good job of characterizing their results. They found that Democrats were likely to see less Democrat-aligned content than Republicans were to see Republican-aligned content. But Republican-aligned as a category included both pro-Republican and anti-Democrat content and the big difference was that Democrats saw less anti-Republican and more anti-Democrat videos. Which may seem like a conspiracy until you imagine the amount of anti-Harris/"uncommitted" content that was on TikTok during the election cycle. Even if you think that have an edge to the a Republican ticket I don't think you could reasonably describe a video by a DSA guy decrying the bombing of Gaza as a pro-Republican video.

Perhaps more succinctly, there was more anti-Democrat material from both sides (and the binary clarification system is reductive in a way that obscures what's going on)

Stupid things for stupid people, no mystery.

Everyone gets a vote.

There's a public relations firm somewhere out there that really hit the ball out of the park for you to have this knee-jerk reaction, don't you think?

That was certainly my experience with it. Overwhelmingly so, even. Not just “Republican” per se, but all sorts of reality-denying nonsense, propaganda, and clearly foreign-influenced trolling. Depressing enough that I removed the app that I once loved to use.

And many platforms had a pro-Democrat lean, especially in the 2020 election. Blaming tiktok seems like scapegoating instead of looking introspectively at the Dem's failings like having a weak leader and pushing various insane ideologies.

What insane ideologies do Dems push? That seems like a weird characterization of either party, although fits Trump specifically -- and I think a lot of Republicans are actually afraid of him.

People can't make up their minds, did dems push insane ideology or did they fail to stray far enough from the status quo?

I'd argue they ran one of the least controversial campaigns in comparison to the current global political climate. I think those in disagreement were successfully convinced by the opposing party.

Trump's first few weeks makes it clear he was the big mover and shaker.

I can make up my mind. They pushed insane ideologies. At the convention the other day not a single nominee said, "Maybe we shouldn't fund sex changes for illegal immigrant prisoners." In fact they supported it.

You've been successfully convinced that this is not only a primary concern for democrats and their voters, but also that this would affect you or anyone you know in any conceivable way.

We question the leadership and judgment of someone who would take such a position, and refuse to walk it back. It is not the case that we expect our lives to change materially as a result of taxpayer-funded illegal immigrant sex change operations.

You realize this is a decision the courts made. Harris agreed to follow the law. That's it. And you know what -- these same laws were on the books under all four years Trump was President. See this document from the DoJ while Trump was President: https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2018/02/13/28_f...

In a way it is revealing that Trump apologists' idea of an "insane Democrat policy" is sticking with existing law which affects almost nobody and they had no interest in discussing as part of their political platform, whilst the new President is pondering the idea of hitting Denmark with tariffs if they don't let him annex Greenland...

A court saying something doesn't obligate everyone to agree that is the way it should be. That basic concept, applied to several other issues, explains most of what is happening now.

- Martin v. Boise. This was overturned, but for 6 years, insanity ruled.

- The general situation with asylum at the border. It's insane that millions of people can just walk across the border, turn themselves in to an immigration officer, tell a sad story (this included domestic violence according to the Biden administration...), get a court date ~10 years in the future, and just live your life in the US until then.

- Seeing clearly dangerous/crazy people with rap sheets a mile long, including violent offenses, released with slaps on the wrist for the 30th time, only to kill someone.

- Less insane but still questionable and a potent issue: various affirmative action laws/rulings, very "Harrison Bergeron"-esque diversity motivated laws/rulings.

If you force people to choose between the rule of law, and... that, then the rule of law might lose. That's what is happening now.

Can you provide proof that such operations are, or were, ongoing at the time of the convention? And if they were happening, in what scale or magnitude?

And once that's done, please also show real-world examples of some of POTUS47's claims that "they're eating the pets, they're eating the cats, eating the dogs".

Because we all know, Donald Trump is known for pushing bullshit, and having lackeys that will ignore reality to believe him. This is not a new trend, it's one with 50+ years of examples.

That biological sex is a social construct, for one, and elementary school children need to learn about it.

When did you see Harris push that in her campaign? Her campaign was extremely basic and as uncontroversial as possible (to the detriment of the dems in my opinion)

I've always heard the opposite. That biological sex is biological. Gender is socially constructed. That's the standard progressive position, although I'm sure you can find someone that says otherwise, or in casual usage conflates sex and gender.

Yah. That's what I meant. It's so nutso I can't keep the claims straight.

No one said biological sex is a social construct.

As a center-lefty I cannot believe people are so silly to not be capable of self-reflecting the left's massive blunders.

Do you not remember "DEFUND THE POLICE!"? That is actually insane policy that the entire party got taken over and was forced to follow along with... even Kamala got slammed for it in the 2024 election! One of many things.

So yes, Trump and the far-right have some off-the-wall crazy stuff, but the left does too. Remember your bias. What seems crazy (i.e. abortion restrictions) does not seem crazy to an entire other segment of the country that you don't share the same exact values to.

And your values and things you don't consider crazy may be considered insane by others.

First, if you read my comment, I said "either party". I actually don't find almost anything pushed from Reps/Dems party as insane (specific politicians I do find genuinely insane though). I think they're almost all somewhat rational, even "defund the police". "Defund the police" has bad marketing, but to this day it still makes sense to not overfund police to do things they aren't well suited to do. This is something Musk would probably even agree with, if not for the marketing.

I don't recall the entire Democratic Party getting taken over, no. I recall Biden saying things like "No, I don‘t support defunding the police." I remember Biden's 2022 crime prevention plan which called for $13 billion to hire 100,000 police officers around the country over a five year period.

If you are incapable of identifying some of the insane positions that clearly lost them the 2024 election, I'm afraid you may be in a bubble and no amount of someone explaining it is going to help.

Or, consider that "insane" is a word that's excessive for pretty much every position of every candidate of every party, primarily used to generate immediate emotional responses and shutting down conversation.

There are positions which I think are dumb, or potentially harmful, or counter to what I believe, etc. But there's rarely been a position I consider "insane" (from all parties!).

If you're immediately jumping to calling every position you disagree with "insane", you're just being hyperbolic.

That may be true, but what matters is perception. It doesn't take very much of the perception of insane to push the winner over the edge. Elections have been known to be decided over single issues. To take a position of "I can't possibly see anything wrong with any of our policies" after a resounding defeat is not very self-reflective.

Zionism

what about the other apps?

Well X has a pretty clear slant as of late. I've tried making a fresh burner account a few times to see what the default algorithm is like and surprise, it's dominated by Elon Musk himself, his fanboys/orbiters, and political content which strongly aligns with his views.

Even when dissenting political content slips into the feed it's usually still about Elon Musk, the algorithm surfaces more mentions of him than the actual president.

Same. Made a burner account, follow nothing and nobody, tweet nothing, like nothing, days later I check in on it and I have like a dozen notifications of tweets from the likes of Alex Jones and Donald Trump Jr.

Benn Jordan did a good video that covered the bots and bias on X recently. Don't know if it or the papers were submitted here before (anyone feel free to submit it not):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y

What was formerly Twitter is now some guy's private web site, just a guy with a whole lot of money.

It was before too, but it was a different guy

It was publicly owned....not one individual.

Well ultimately all centralized sites are someone's -- some person, or some company.

The previous incarnation had its own biases and such, but it did try to run a little more like a real company with official policies. The current incarnation is whatever Elon's mood this second happens to be.

Don't be naive. The previous management also used their power to promote their preferred narratives in arbitrary and capricious ways with no regard for fundamental principles and no accountability. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The only reason I even knew who Jack Dorsey was was from podcasts talking about him. Elon's tweets show up in my feed regularly, and sometimes are even pushed to my phone, despite not engaging with them and even explicitly pressing the "show less" button. (I also get push notification from conservative accounts, despite being what most of them would call "far left")

Why would you ever allow push notifications from any social media? And on X you can still mute or block individual accounts that you don't want to see.

That isn’t the point of this entire thread, though. It’s about what the default is, because like it or not, most people are crazy susceptible and have practically zero media literacy.

Twitter before Musk had a bias toward promoting conservatives [1].

[1] https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter...

Of course it did. This is why so many want it out of the US. It's a propaganda vehicle for the CCP. Our citizens have an IV drip of bullshit feeding them 24x7.

This is why Trump wants to save it. Back in his first term he tried to destroy it[0]. Flash forward to now, he openly acknowledges that it helped him win[1]. He doesn't want to lose that influence if it gets dismantled, so of course he's now talking about introducing a sovereign wealth fund and use it to buy tik tok[2].

- [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/us/politics/trump-tik-tok...

- [1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5042241-president-elec...

- [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...

And obviously China preferred Trump in office (of course they wouldn't admit it, because whoever China backs helps the other party). The more batty the US is in international relations the more our soft power declines and China's soft power rises. Destruction of USAID was a huge win for China. If Trump effectively controls both Tik Tok and Twitter, huge numbers of people under 30 will only know what Trump wants them to know.

Which is why Trump added tariffs on China. To… to blur his tracks. The best action is to do the opposite of what you want to do, so people don’t know what you’re doing.

This, or China supports the Dems, and everything else becomes logical. But let’s start the narrative that Trump supports China by banning their apps and products.

Hahaha. "banning". Only Trump could save a company from being banned, try to buy it with US tax dollars, and have his stooges claim he's against the company.

In the eyes of China, Trump's piddly little tariffs are a small price to pay for the damage he'll inflict on the US over the next 4 years.

Foreign adversaries don't care about political party. They want chaos, internal division, and institutional destruction, and for the moment, that means Trump. If there was a viable candidate from BlueTeam who promised to sow chaos and dismantle the government, you can bet they'd support them just as happily.

Do they want tariffs to be placed on them?

Putting myself in the shoes of an opposing country, a few minor tariffs is a small price to pay if my opponent is willingly tearing its own institutions and governing structures down.

I suppose we can all speculate, but the thesis is unfalsifiable with arguments like that.

This comment is just adding storytelling around facts, but doesn’t contain facts. I could build the opposite storytelling with the same facts.

Considering Trump originally wanted to ban TikTok his previous term... Yeah...

I don't know how to ask this without striking ire, but how much of this was simply due to Trump's ... um... personality?

That's not algorithmic bias, that's a large delta in content quality.

Videos coming out of the Harris camps were milquetoast in comparison to the Trump camp. Of course those videos get more attention, from people that like him and hate him, and therefore get pushed more by the algorithm.

>Of course those videos get more attention [...] and therefore get pushed more by the algorithm.

From the article:

"These differences were consistent across all three states and could not be explained by differences in engagement metrics like likes, views, shares, comments, or followers."

The main use case of technology and AI is to sway public opinion. Elon Musk is one of the richest men in the world and that's where he spends most of his focus. If you're building technology, know that this is the endgame, and proceed with caution.

The amount of deceit per dollar you can generate today is profoundly inexpensive when compared to the entirety of human history. Sadly, our cowardly tech giants are the antithesis of the morals espoused in comic books they grew up on, seeking to abdicate all responsibility as they achieve unprecedented power.

This makes sense - as Paul Graham mentioned in his essay from January [1] “outrage means traffic”.

No-one gets more outraged than left leaning viewers watching Trump videos.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

> outrage means traffic

Which CGP Grey also described a decade ago: https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?t=200 "This Video Will Make You Angry" [2015-03-10]

Curious as when I was still using TikTok I was getting pro-Trump content in between my usual communist/worker’s rights or pro-Palestinian content.

Karl Marx gave the proletariat eleven zeppelins, yo!

https://xkcd.com/992/

That suggests a clumsy PAC-driven campaign to shove a candidate into your feed, without actually doing anything meaningful to update the algorithm for general Republican/conservative propaganda.

Part of it might have also been the (remarkably cynical and dishonest) Arabs for Trump movement, directly linking Trump campaign stuff to pro-Palestinian viewers.

> pro-Palestinian content

This is an issue heavily pushed by the Republican Party

Uhh no? Neither party held a pro-palestian position, Trump told Netanyahou to "finish the job" [1] before the election.

[1] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/americas/artc-t...

It went both ways. They actively attempted to amplify the narrative that the war in Gaza was entirely on Israel and that it was the democrats fault despite relatively no interest from the republicans in actually helping those in Gaza. It was a successful campaign largely. This was a divisive issue for more lefty dems.

It's not that surprising, all of that content is aimed at destabilizing the US.

Why is it called bias, as if the results should be even? Would we say that there is a bias in TikTok to show interesting videos, instead of boring videos? I guess you could describe it as such, but the term carries an implication of impropriety with it, as if what displays bias should rightfully not display bias.

Liberals love consuming Trump content, maybe even more than conservatives. Sort of like the Howard Stern effect. Because after they do, they can go post on Twitter and reddit about how stupid Trump is.

Conservatives didn't have that with Harris. Maybe because all of her content was so scripted and her entire personality that we were allowed to see was designed by committee, and frankly there was just much less content. Trump would go on a 4 hour tirade about some random thing like Greenland. Meanwhile, Harris was tightly controlled by her handlers, only giving "safe" interviews, probably thinking that playing it safe and not fumbling somewhere would be the path to the white house.

> Conservatives didn't have that with Harris.

Conservatives spent days nitpicking every single thing they could about Harris and would just invent things about Walz. Tim Walz's son cried and conservative media and social networks ran that into the ground for weeks. Acting like MAGA didn't say anything about Harris/Walz is pure delusion.

I think that shows conservatives were so starved for rage content that they needed to latch onto the side-show of a side-show in order to scratch that itch. Sequestering your candidate away from any kind of challenge certainly is a strategy.

I never said MAGA didn't say anything about Harris/walz. Is that what you took away from my post?

> Liberals love consuming Trump content, maybe even more than conservatives. Sort of like the Howard Stern effect. Because after they do, they can go post on Twitter and reddit about how stupid Trump is.

> Conservatives didn't have that with Harris.

Yes that is what I took from this.

> Sequestering your candidate away from any kind of challenge certainly is a strategy.

Interviews with Fox News and a public debate does not read as running away from challenge. She is not the one who ran from the debates.

Harris had fewer than half the media appearances as Trump. There is nothing to debate on this front.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-harris-tv-podca...

Doing less media != Running away from challenges. I'm sure all the right wing interviews and podcast appearances Trump did really threw him the hard questions.

I don't think there's any shortage of Republicans posting on X about how dumb progressives are; I'm skeptical that liberals are any more prone to outrage than conservatives are. Check out, say, liboftiktok if you want a prime example.

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