(TargetLiberty.org) – A social media personality has admitted the Biden administration is using influencers to push its messages to young people. Worryingly, many of these influencers went on to repeat the White House’s lines without criticism. Is this journalism, or perhaps a new level of propaganda?
TikTok Star Who Met With @PressSec Agrees White House Used Influencers as 'PAWNS' https://t.co/SrhUMrU7r7
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) April 7, 2022
On March 11, the Washington Post reported 30 TikTok stars had joined a Zoom meeting with White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki and staffers from the National Security Council. The goal was to brief the influencers on the administration’s goals. Many people use TikTok as a news source, for some reason, and the White House wanted to influence what viewers were seeing.
Now, one of those TikTok personalities has gone public with concerns about what the administration is doing. Kahlil Greene, who uses the online name Gen Z Historian, took part in the March 10 conference. Greene says he wants to be an objective commenter and hold the government to account – but, he warned, many of the others just repeated the administration’s talking points.
Greene said that when he saw criticism of the conference from Conservatives, who claimed the influencers were being “used as pawns” by the administration, “it was hard to argue against that.” He said he’d assumed the other TikTok stars would have “ the same level of journalistic integrity and criticism” as he does – but “a lot of them didn’t.”
The relationship between the government and the media is complicated, but when the media uncritically repeats the government line, it isn’t journalism anymore; it’s propaganda. And, with TikTok mostly popular among young people, it’s propaganda aimed at our children.
Should this be acceptable?
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