“Texas was built by hope,” the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, James Talarico, intones in the opening seconds of his campaign ad “Anthem.”
As instrumental music swells and vistas of Texas grasslands and working people cross the screen, Mr. Talarico promises to take back the state “not with anger, not with fear, not with division, but with the hope that built this state.”
Hope is an eternal theme in political ads. But this year, it is likely to get an algorithmic boost from the short-form video format that is dominating the political landscape.
For most of our social media era, political discourse online has involved endless doom scrolling — depressing journeys through feeds optimized to generate alarm and outrage. One beneficiary of these destructive algorithmic optimizations is President Trump, whose expert mudslinging seems especially tuned to rise to the top of our outrage channels.
But social media is changing. Apps like TikTok and Instagram tend to prioritize how long people watch a video, which researchers say can prioritize optimistic content. That’s good news for candidates with positive messages who now have a better shot of rising to the top of people’s news feeds and mobilizing voters, particularly young ones. And it’s good news for people like me who are desperate to escape the doom scroll.
The hope scroll is transforming our political landscape in real time. Example No. 1 is Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, who sold his affordability pitch with a series of viral videos of himself doing a polar bear plunge, walking the length of Manhattan and hugging taxi drivers on the night shift. Some researchers argue that his mastery of the medium fueled his historic mobilization of 18-to-25-year-old voters.
Or how about the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed? He, too, has been all but omnipresent on social media, dancing, lifting weights and even singing in a “Blue’s Clues”-inspired animated video.
Perhaps the grand master of the hope scroll is Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey: Data from the progressive communications agency Magnitude Media ranks Mr. Booker as the most popular elected official on social media (based on views) by a lot, with over 420 million views on his posts. As chair of the Democratic Strategic Communications Committee, Mr. Booker has been pushing his colleagues to post more online, partly in an effort to win back the younger male voters they lost in the 2024 elections.
Mr. Booker, who is expected to cruise to re-election this fall and is rumored to be running for president in 2028, is a high-volume hope poster. He drops new content to his TikTok accounts roughly 135 times a month, much of it heartwarming videos of him jogging, talking about the importance of being humble and reposting a video of firefighters saving children from a burning building. “He’s destroying everyone else on Instagram because of his hope videos,” said the former Democratic political strategist Tara McGowan.
Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Mr. Talarico, rising stars in Democratic politics, are also flooding their feeds with inspirational clips. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another Democratic star and rumored 2028 presidential candidate, went viral for posting straight-to-camera candid conversational videos about her decision to freeze her eggs. Representative Brandon Gill, the youngest Republican in Congress, regularly posts video carousels of himself and his family set to uplifting music, with captions like “God and family are everything.”
Short-form video got much of its start in aspirational content. TikTok traces its roots to the app Musical.ly, where teens shared dance moves. YouTube built its empire on offering experts, such as woodworkers and makeup artists, opportunities to showcase their mastery. And that aspirational approach appears to have influenced the algorithms, too.
“Joyful and positive content has an advantage in the recommendation environment,” said Nitin Agarwal, an information science professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who published a study of 685,842 YouTube short videos last year.
Of course, outrage still sells, particularly in prompting what’s called engagement, when viewers add comments and like or share posts. Facebook and X, formerly called Twitter, both have algorithms that prioritize this type of engagement. The X algorithm tends to push users toward provocative content, according to a recent study by Stanford researchers.
Fortunately, those platforms are declining in relevancy: YouTube and TikTok were the leading social media apps on mobile devices in the United States in 2025 by time spent, surpassing both Facebook and X. Short-form video algorithms are less reliant on likes and more attuned to how long viewers spend watching videos, according to the little we know about these black box algorithms. The focus on watch time gives hope a better chance to rank higher.
The primacy of short-form video has “definitely changed what people consider to be a good candidate or viable candidate,” said Kyle Tharp in an interview. He tracks online political influence through the newsletter Chaotic Era. “Being able to deliver a very good inspirational message and look the part — that is the whole ballgame.”
I, for one, would love an era in which politicians compete on hope and inspiration instead of mockery and cruelty. It’s better for our mental health and our daily outlook. Even if it takes a social media algorithm to help make that happen.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post TikTok Is Changing Politics (Perhaps for the Better) appeared first on New York Times.
