Link-o-rama #4: Short shorts work and the battle for the TikTok vote

It’s a Link-o-rama (tm), brought to you by summer Covid – which I picked up by having the hubris to partake in air travel. Be safe out there, y’all.

• Per the NYT, there may be something to this short-form video content thing. The youngs, and the rest of us whose attention spans have been whittled down by years of social media-fed dopamine hits, like quick hits – even when they add up to something that is more than the sum of its parts. Someone should build a business on this. Actually, that’s the subtext Madison Malone Kircher hits us with – the format is sticky with us scrollers, but also a necessary part of riding the TikTok algorithm, where more short form = more clicks, which “increases the chance that the platform’s opaque and powerful algorithm will prioritize their content.”

• Speaking of TikTok, check out this Wired piece about how the TikTok algorithm seemingly served up far right extremist political content to Germans ahead of the EU elections. TikTok, offered the opportunity to comment, did not dispute the findings. From the piece: “Research shows that even if users don’t click on any of the search suggestions in the app, simply seeing the suggestions is enough to make the terms stick in people’s brains, and the more extreme the suggestions the more likely they are to remember.”

• Speaking of the right, 18-year-old Brilyn Hollyhand successfully pitched the RNC on a creator strategy and is now helming efforts that brought a slew of creators, like Jamie Villamor, a competitive pistol shooter and model and Emily Austin, a sports and entertainment-focused creator, to this week’s convention. Hollyhand, a high school senior, will vote in his first election this fall, writes Kaya Yurieff in The Information. [paywall]

• Luckily, Politico is right on time with an interview with Olivia Julianna, 21-year-old Biden-supporting social media star, who has a theory on why Trump is dominating TikTok (Trump’s TikTok following 7.4M. Biden’s: 405K.) Julianna’s take on why Trump is #winning the Tok? “The Biden HQ content often is very policy-driven. It’s very policy- or issue-focused. At times it can be very intellectual, whereas Trump’s is just like, “I’m Donald Trump, and I’m at a UFC fight.”

• What does the glammed up version of all this look like? The 31-year-old Kennedy family scion Jack Schlossberg, who with “legions” of followers on social media, was just hired by Vogue as a political correspondent. This frothy description brings an ironic guffaw from even my Covid-numbed brain: “He keeps his apartment stocked with fresh flowers (his favorites are carnations), and he attributes his largely colorless wardrobe to the Johnny Cash song “Man in Black.”

Work worth a 👀

Masterful use of “Baby Elephant Walk” here ⬆️