PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – With the changing dynamics of the November presidential election, Project Coconut took off quickly to persuade young progressives to support U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on TikTok, the social media platform for first-time voters.
Last year, during a speech at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s Indian Treaty Room, in the White House compound, Harris quoted her late Indian-American mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist.
Harris was addressing the new commissioners for an initiative to advance educational equity for Latino and Hispanic communities. There was laughter when she used her mother’s words for context.
“Part of the extension of the work you will do is, yes, focused on our young leaders and our young people, but understanding we also then have to be clear about the needs of their parents and their grandparents and their teachers and their communities, because none of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context,” Harris said. “My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
After President Joe Biden’s endorsement last Sunday, Gen Z got bombarded with “Kamalove” and the “Kamalanomenon” trending. Beyonce’s “BHive” turned into the “KHive.” Even a British pop star got in on it. Charlotte “Charli XCX” Aitchison, who released her “Brat” album in June and set the “Brat Summer” season, wrote, “kamala IS brat.” Then the “Brats for Kamala” remixes with the album’s neon green followed. The LGBTQ community shared a meme with coconuts and RuPaul dressed in green saying, “Mother has arrived!”
@kamalac0c0nut my mother used to give us a 🥥 🌴 #projectcoconut #kamala ♬ 365 Coconut Trees - mxwlch03
To fire up young conservatives and Christian “Zoomers,” Donald Trump has used Truth Social to rave about Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a retired U.S. Marine whose memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” turned into a film on Netflix. After Trump survived the July 13 assassination attempt, Elon Musk wrote on X — which he has owned since 2022 and rebranded — that he “fully” endorsed him. The “Crypto bros” celebrated Trump’s “crypto capital” promise on X and “Trumpists” turned to Telegram and Twitch.
For a perspective on those exposed to the propaganda on the age of artificial intelligence-powered editing tools, Carlton Gillespie, of Florida International University; Laralyn Jackson, of the University of Miami; and Liv Caputo, of Florida State University; joined Local 10 News This Week In South Florida Anchor Glenna Milberg’s NextGen Roundtable on Sunday. The three are aspiring journalists.
Caputo, who reports for The Floridian, said she is concerned young people are not getting both sides of the story or diversity of thought to formulate their opinions when exposed to customized content that fuels blind loyalty. Social media algorithms collect users’ data to define relevancy so the users spend more time on site, a metric relevant to advertisers.
“A lot of people who are on very far right or far left sides of TikTok ... They know there is an algorithm. They know there is something, you know, putting out what they want to see and they like it. You know, they are like, ‘Alright great, my For You Page is great today. I love it!’ So I think people who are already in those mindsets, they don’t want to hear views that are different than theirs.”
The Trump campaign had to switch gears. For months, Republicans were exploiting every opportunity to ridicule Biden, 81, as no longer fit to serve as president. Videos showed him unable to put his jacket on, dropping his glasses, and acting disoriented on different occasions. The White House referred to these as “cheap fakes.” Media manipulation is a reality on social media.
“There are actors who will build backwards from a premise. Instead of taking in the facts and forming an opinion, they will reach a conclusion and work backwards. And you have so many tools on social media to help you craft a narrative or a persona that gets across whatever your idea is, without having to consider facts,” said Gillespie, who has reported for Caplin News and WLRN.
Harris, a Howard University graduate, has been proud of her Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority membership. She also connected with Keke Palmer, an actress who runs the “Baby, This is Keke Palmer” weekly podcast on the Wondery, during the 2022 Essence Festival in New Orleans. Jackson said these moments make her personable.
“So many young Black women can see themselves in her, not just that, she reaches such a broad audience, and she is very personable, and I think this is how she created her big viral moment,” said Jackson, a multilingual multimedia Haitian-American reporter for UM TV and The Miami Hurricane. “It’s not just about coconut trees, and her making jokes and people making fan edits of her.”
Caputo, the daughter of Politico’s Marc Caputo; Gillespie, who is a Local 10 News intern; and Jackson agreed it is highly likely that a Gen-Z staff is behind Harris’s new social media voice. With Israel and Ukraine at war and so much at stake during the next three-month campaign season, they also share two concerns: The fast spread of misinformation and the increasing impact of disinformation.
On Friday night, Musk shared a 1-minute-52-second-long video on X with an edit on the voice-over audio to mimic Harris’s voice saying, “I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate.” It was a political satire first shared by YouTube user Mr Reagan, who labeled it “Ad PARODY” for his 348,000 subscribers on Friday morning.
“This is amazing,” the man behind SpaceX and Tesla wrote to his 191.5 million followers on Friday night. He added a laughter icon when he shared the video without the “parody” label.
Watch the TWISF episode