Big on TikTok: Fox News?

During the 2024 election, political journalists and operatives obsessed over TikTok’s influence on our news and politics. There were endless takes (including a whole newsletter from me) about how Kamala Harris's campaign was using the platform, how the Trump campaign was leveraging right-wing creators on it, and whether the app would be banned by the incoming administration. Since Trump took office, that media attention has largely evaporated, even as the platform has continued to grow and reshape how Americans consume political news.

But over the past year, I've watched major news accounts continue to grow rapidly on the platform, especially on the Right. Fox News, in particular, has quietly built one of the most dominant conservative-leaning news operations on TikTok.

Throughout most of the 2024 cycle, Fox News and other conservative media brands lagged badly behind both liberal and mainstream news accounts on the platform in terms of views, likes, and follower growth. As I wrote at the time, the right's TikTok strategy was fueled almost entirely by the Trump campaign, a handful of independent creators and meme accounts, and some politics-adjacent brands like Barstool Sports, while the major conservative news outlets sat on the sidelines or failed to build an audience.

That has changed dramatically over the past 18 months. The social team at Fox News has tripled the account's monthly posting cadence and, as a result, watched its follower count balloon from roughly 500,000 in October 2024 to nearly 11 million today. 

The outlet’s view counts tell an even more striking story. Fox News videos on TikTok now regularly average close to 1 billion views per month. For context, the account only registered a fraction of that during the final months of the 2024 election. 

Fox itself has been crowing about these numbers — in a March release, the network noted that its engagement on TikTok was up 49% compared to the prior year. 

While many TikTok users primarily encounter political content through individual creators (think Carlos Eduardo Espina or Adam Mockler), verified news brands now make up a large share of the news and politics ecosystem on the platform. That's due in part to the fact that legacy news companies have an endless supply of video and headlines that producers can clip up and repackage for vertical formats. For major news aggregators, success on TikTok often comes down to one key variable: post volume.

The rise of the right-wing media giant on TikTok has a few implications for 2026 and beyond that are worth thinking about. With a few exceptions, pro-Democrat news creators and liberal media outlets have historically dominated TikTok in part because the right ceded the ground to them. With the platform under new ownership and conservative organizations more open to joining the app, that asymmetry may be over. At least the team at Fox News has quickly figured out the formula, and they're scaling it fast.

Last summer, when independent journalist Taylor Lorenz published an exposé detailing how one Democratic group was paying social media creators to coordinate messaging and post about politics without any disclosures, I didn't bother sharing it here. That's because I already knew that undisclosed creator marketing has become ubiquitous on the Left, and I'd be more surprised to find a major, well-funded campaign or organization that wasn't paying creators in some fashion. A week doesn't pass without some PAC, campaign, or nonprofit inviting me to a webinar where its staff want to brag about the results of their creator marketing program.

But despite the fact that basically everyone in Democratic politics is running some version of a pay-influencers-to-post scheme, the political influencer industry keeps igniting mini-media firestorms as the midterms heat up and 2028 approaches.

The latest example comes from California, where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is under fire for flooding the zone with his creator marketing program. According to Semafor, “his team has offered creators everything from $10 a post to nearly half a million for communications consulting in the hopes that they’ll spread the word about him, or at least take his opponents down a peg.” That includes paying The Shade Room, Quentin Quarantino, and Carlos Eduardo Espina large sums in exchange for favorable content, and several massive anonymous Instagram aggregator accounts have also amplified pro-Steyer content. Meanwhile, the Steyer campaign is accusing their chief Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra, of running an army of fake bot accounts to amplify his own messaging. 

It’s all such a mess, completely unregulated by any government entity, and unfortunately, it's the future of digital politics.