No one was celebrating in 2022’s economy.
If you got into investing in mid-2020 or in 2021 — which many people did — you probably had a nice time. Stocks soared after the market crashed at the onset of the pandemic. Crypto took off, too. The meme stock craze driven by GameStop and AMC was comically profitable for some, at least while the joke lasted. NFTs were pretty completely made up, but hey, they were worth a lot of money. And isn’t all money just made up, anyway?
The situation certainly felt like a bubble, but it was a fun bubble to be in, as many bubbles are. It can feel like quite the party. It’s less fun when the bubble bursts … which is where we landed in 2022. The line that kept going up suddenly couldn’t stop going down.
It has been a rough stretch for the economy overall. For stock market investors, major indexes like the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the NASDAQ are all set to end the year in the red. Crypto winter is most definitely here. The housing market is in trouble, and mortgage rates, which have been low for years, are climbing. Inflation is at a 40-year high, cutting into recent wage gains. The Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation by increasing interest rates is threatening to throw workers out of jobs and push the country into recession. Americans, on the whole, still have hundreds of billions of dollars in excess savings built up during the pandemic, but they’re spending that money down.
The Fed’s whole thing is it’s supposed to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going. There are those who argue it waited too long and everybody got too drunk, or that it’s moving too fast and plenty of people are still stone-cold sober, or that the punch bowl isn’t where the liquor is at all. Whatever the case, it appears the party, for now, is over.
It is super easy to feel like a genius in a bull market
The stock market’s run over the past decade or so has generally been pretty good. Though stocks plunged when the pandemic hit, they rebounded quickly — the market got an enormous amount of support from the Fed, and many people dipped their toes into day trading for the first time. In some corners, it felt as though investors couldn’t lose. The S&P gained 16 percent in 2020 and 27 percent in 2021. But this year, it’s given a lot of those gains back.
That 2022 would be a tough year for stock market investors wasn’t necessarily surprising, given the market’s 2021 gains, explained Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at investment research firm CFRA Research, in an interview. “Every time the market is up by 20 percent or more, we experienced a decline of at least 5 to 10 percent, the average actually being a correction of 10 and 15 percent. This time, unfortunately, it ended up being a bear market,” he said, meaning a decline of 20 percent. That to-be-expected decline has been exacerbated by some external factors that made it worse. “The Fed did wait too long to start to raise interest rates. We did not see the supply disruption unwind as quickly as many thought it would, and heading into this year, the Russia-Ukraine situation had not [yet] exploded,” Stovall added. Also a factor is China’s continued hard stance on Covid, which has economic implications around the globe.
Big tech stocks have come back down to earth after a pretty impressive run. Investor interest in some of the weirder stuff, from meme stocks to cryptocurrencies to NFTs, has declined, and in turn, so have their prices. Across the board, there haven’t been many places for investors to hide — even the normal refuge of the bond market wasn’t safe.
“This is the first time in decades that both the stock market and the bond market went down simultaneously. It created a lot of disruption for investors this year because really there was no place, not even gold,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer and founding partner at Cresset Capital. (The narrative that “bitcoin is a good inflation hedge” seems not to have borne out either.)
It’s not necessarily a terrible thing that some assets whose prior valuations weren’t entirely justifiable come back to a little more realistic level. Plenty of people like their Pelotons, but the company was probably never actually worth $50 billion. And for investors still interested in those assets, lower prices might be an opportunity to buy. “Look, think of stocks and the stock market like any other product. Do you want to buy steak when it’s $18 a pound or do you want to buy that same steak when it’s $10 a pound?” Ablin said. “When the price goes down, it actually turns out to be a better deal.”
To be sure, there are no guarantees that markets won’t get worse before they get better. The Fed is poised to continue to raise interest rates in 2023, a maneuver not exactly loved by investors. Stovall said he doesn’t see 2023 mirroring 2022 — but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve hit bottom yet, either. In October, he asked a group of financial advisers whether they’d heard from their “bell ringer” clients — the people who want to get aggressive when the market tops and sell just as it’s bottoming, to make the wrong move at just the wrong moment. They hadn’t. He told them, “Either you’re doing too good of a job of keeping them in tune and so forth, or we have not really seen the capitulation that we usually see at the end of a bear market.”
It’s inflation’s economy and we just live in it
The main economic storyline of 2022 has been inflation. It is high, it is persistent, it is annoying. It has made everything else about the economy feel really bad even when, by many indications, there’s plenty of good going on, too. Wages are up, a lot of jobs are available, and consumers, for much of the year, have kept up spending.
Still, there is at the very least the risk of some dark clouds on the horizon. Retail sales fell in the US in November, with declines in areas such as furniture and motor vehicles. Inflation is bad, full stop. The steps the Fed is taking to try to get it under control could lead to more bad, too, and make everything worse before it gets better. Loan interest rates are getting more expensive. People are putting more debt on their credit cards. If the Fed gets its way, workers could end up losing their jobs as the Fed has made clear it is seeking a slowdown in the labor market.
“Despite the slowdown in growth, the labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low, job vacancies still very high, and wage growth elevated,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said at a mid-December press conference, noting that the US had added an average of 272,000 jobs per month over the last three months. “Although job vacancies have moved below their highs and the pace of job gains has slowed from earlier in the year, the labor market continues to be out of balance.”
“The medicine has a possibility of being worse than the disease,” said Ira Regmi, program manager for the macroeconomic analysis program at the Roosevelt Institute. They noted this will have a disproportionate impact as well. “Everything that happens in the economy happens at a faster rate and at a larger scale to Black and brown people. They’re the first to get fired, the last to get hired.”
The economic supports the government handed out during the pandemic are now in the rearview mirror. Stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit money have been spent. For those out of a job, unemployment insurance is back to how it was before (which is to say: a disaster).
That doesn’t mean the government isn’t doing anything on the economy. Lindsay Owens, executive director of progressive think tank the Groundwork Collective, noted that the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in mid-2022, makes important investments in areas such as climate and health care. “There’s a pretty substantial amount of long-term investment that’s just getting started and that we’re going to see over years if not decades,” she said. Still, people aren’t going to feel that with the same immediacy as a check arriving in the mail. “Maybe a caveat is that the sugar high is over,” Owens said. “Allowance is over, but the college fund is flush.”
The fun is over and it’s not clear if what’s next is fine or a funeral
There are plenty of reasons to feel better about 2022 than 2021, money-wise. The broad availability of Covid-19 vaccines means the economy in a lot of ways has returned to normal. Many of the supply chain kinks that dogged the 2021 holiday season, for example, have been worked out. The job market has rebounded, and many workers have found an unprecedented level of power and leverage.
Sure, it sucks if you lost money in the markets this year, but on the whole, the stock market generally goes up over time — really, staring at your 401(k) isn’t going to do anything for you right now. It also sucks if you lost money in crypto, which, you know, it’s not so clear on whether that one goes up over time generally or not, especially depending on the coin. A lot of market experts — and crypto people — say these kinds of moments are when some of the investments and companies that were garbage in the first place get washed out, which is overall not the worst thing in the world. They also say it’s good for new investors to learn that prices can go down, even if they’re learning the hard way. I suppose if everybody decides the cartoon jpeg monkeys were probably not actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is probably fine.
Falling stock prices, high inflation, and rising interest rates are not fun, but maybe the reason it seems like the party is over isn’t necessarily the current situation. Instead, it might be the overarching uncertainty of what lies ahead. It’s a little hard to feel woohoo about anything when there’s a threat of an economic downturn ahead. Recession fears are looming, which brings the current mood down, regardless of anyone’s individual economic situation.
“2023 could be a really painful year,” Owens said.
Best-case scenario is the Fed engineers a soft landing and brings inflation under control without throwing the economy into reverse. Worst-case scenario is it pumps the brakes too hard, throwing millions of people out of work and causing turmoil for an undetermined amount of time. Wild cards remain — Russia-Ukraine, China, and Covid, for example. Given what’s happened over the past three years, who could even begin to guess what’s next? Markets are just like people in that respect: clearly anxious about the situation.
The party’s on pause for now, but it’s good to remember that the financial festivities probably aren’t over forever.
From climate to housing, these policy and science wins suggest that 2022 was full of progress.
2022 wasn’t as defined by the coronavirus pandemic as 2020 or 2021, but it was still marred by its fallout. War, a tightening economy, and major shifts in the global world order contributed to a sense of continued tough times ahead. Perhaps not coincidentally, a recent poll found that about 4 in 10 Americans believe we’re currently living in the “end times.”
That said, 2022 did have its silver linings, those moments where hope for the future shined through. Something we like to do here at Future Perfect is reflect back on the wins that might have gotten lost in the (very understandable!) noise. From knocking asteroids out of the sky to becoming one step closer to having cell-cultivated meat on the table, 2022 saw progress in scientific research and policy that could define — and improve — the trajectory of human development for years to come.
It’s hard to feel optimistic, especially as the uncertainty of 2023 approaches. But if our capacity for discovery, collaboration, and altruism can prove anything, it’s that progress can be a refreshing source of hope. Here are the nine breakthroughs this year that made us excited about progress. —Izzie Ramirez
The US was able to slow the spread of mpox virus
This winter season, Americans are facing an uptick in covid, flu, and RSV, a “tripledemic,” as some public health experts call it. However, it’s not all bad news: The spread of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has slowed in the US.
Mpox, a flu-like disease that creates painful blisters and rashes, was first confirmed in the US in a Boston patient in May. Since then, there have been 20 deaths from the virus and nearly 30,000 cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the outbreak’s peak in early August, the daily average in the US was up to 462 mpox cases. As of now, though, the daily average is just five cases.
While it took time for the US to declare mpox a public health emergency — which ramped up vaccine distribution and data-sharing between cities and states — over 1.1 million doses of the two-part mpox vaccine have been administered since June. This is despite the fact the distribution of pre-existing mpox vaccines were delayed by the need for states to manually request doses from the national stockpile, which was severely depleted due to bureaucratic hold-ups and logistics issues.
The willingness of high-risk individuals to adjust their lifestyle to avoid infection also contributed to the declining rate of infection, as Noah Weiland reported for the New York Times. In fact, it was LGBTQ+ activists who pushed the Biden administration to declare an emergency declaration. It helped that, unlike Covid, mpox is not an airborne illness and is transmitted via direct contact with an infected individual — making it much easier to curb the spread.
Given the current course of the virus, the Department of Health and Human Services has said it will not renew the state of emergency beyond January 31. America’s efficient handling of the mpox virus provides hope that the spread of other such viruses can be stopped if communities follow guidance from health care professionals and advocate for more resources. —Rachel DuRose
NASA successfully flew a spacecraft into a targeted asteroid, marking a crucial first step toward a system of planetary defense
Some 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid struck the Earth. The impact was so catastrophic that it caused the most recent of five mass extinction events, wiping out 75 percent of the planet’s species, including the dinosaurs. And if the heavens were to hurl a similar asteroid toward us once again, we wouldn’t have been much better prepared than the dinosaurs. That is, until the evening of September 26.
That night, NASA successfully crashed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, more than 7 million miles away from Earth. The double asteroid posed no threat to our planet, but they were great test subjects to see whether humanity could one day protect itself from a proven existential risk.
For the past two decades, NASA has scanned the skies and cataloged near-Earth objects sizable enough to pose a threat to civilization. Thankfully, with 95 percent of known objects tracked, none appear to be heading our way anytime soon.
But seeing them coming is one thing; surviving them is another. DART’s targeted collision demonstrated the first successful deflection technology, moving Dimorphos 1 percent closer to Didymos. An asteroid of truly threatening size would be far harder to deflect, but at least now we know such a planetary defense system is actually possible. —Oshan Jarow
After decades of prohibition, government-funded psychedelic research is back
Psychedelics got a rough start in the US. Early research in the 1950s and ’60s was generally promising, though it existed on a spectrum that included overhyped and methodologically suspect results. But as psychedelics helped fuel a rising moral panic in the 1960s and the war on drugs escalated, President Richard Nixon ultimately outlawed psychedelics (among other drugs) under the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and federal funding for psychedelic research froze.
A renaissance in psychedelic research began in the mid-2000s. But until now, the research was privately funded, limiting both the resources and the momentum to further develop a field that has shown real promise around mental health. Building off a successful 2014 pilot study, however, the National Institutes of Health handed Johns Hopkins Medicine $4 million last October to research whether psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms) could help people quit smoking. This was the first federal grant for psychedelic research in over 50 years, and it came from the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. Getting the government back on board marks a major shift in institutional support.
This March, President Joe Biden announced initiatives to address the nation’s “mental health crisis,” including boosting system capacity, connecting more Americans to care, and expanding resources (as well as protections from the potential harms of social media) for young people. Psychedelics could add a timely new tool. In addition to efficacy in potentially treating conditions like depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder, the benefits appear uniquely long-lasting after just a single dose.
States, too, are taking notice: 25 states have considered psychedelic policy reform, and Colorado recently joined Oregon as the second to legalize psychedelics for medicinal purposes. But if the benefits of psychedelics are uniquely potent, so, too, is the need for careful research and risk management. Back in the government’s good graces, psychedelic research now has the resources available to do just that. —OJ
From Covid-19 to malaria, it looks like we’re entering a golden age in vaccine development
Vaccine development is ordinarily a sluggish process. Historically, the time between finding the microbe causing the disease and developing a vaccine has averaged about 48 years (excluding smallpox and Covid-19), according to the Center for Global Development. Only about 39.6 percent of privately developed vaccines succeed in clinical trials. The number is even lower — 6.8 percent — for those developed outside of private industry, such as through academic hospitals.
Against this backdrop, consider 2020’s Covid-19 vaccines: The period from sequencing the virus to developing a candidate vaccine strain was roughly two days. Within less than a year, the vaccine received emergency use authorization and began reaching the population. Within less than two years, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval. Beyond regulatory miracles, the Covid-19 vaccine put over a decade of research into mRNA technology into practice, heralding a new generation of vaccines.
But Covid-19 vaccines were only one among a flurry of breakthroughs. Malaria, which infected 247 million people in 2021 and killed 619,000, saw a series of positive developments on the vaccine front. After roughly 60 years of effort, 2021 saw the first malaria vaccine approved by the World Health Organization, offering a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria. 2022’s improved version of the vaccine is already showing promise in clinical trials, reaching 80 percent efficacy after three doses and a booster. While early signs are promising, the vaccine will need to pass further clinical trials before receiving approval.
Another multi-decade search, this time for a universal flu vaccine, also found an answer (at least in mice and ferrets). Each year, seasonal flu vaccines are tailored to whichever of the 20 known strains of influenza are predicted to be most prevalent that season. In November, the mRNA technology employed in Covid-19 vaccines was used to develop a flu vaccine that offers protection against all 20 influenza strains. The vaccine would not replace seasonal flu shots, but it would dampen the severity of cases by increasing baseline levels of immune protection. Despite performing well in animal trials, the vaccine still awaits clinical trials in humans.
And finally, the first human trials for a new HIV vaccine successfully produced protective antibodies in 97 percent of recipients. The results offer hope that we might curb the spread of HIV, which newly infected an estimated 1.5 million people in 2021.
One might hope that catastrophe isn’t a necessary ingredient for progress. But for deadly diseases like Covid-19, malaria, influenza, and HIV, this year offered hope that in the future, prevention may prevail. —OJ
The hole in Earth’s ozone layer is shrinking
The ozone hole is the unnatural, human-caused thinning of the part of the atmosphere that absorbs ultraviolet radiation. When scientists discovered the growing hole in the 1970s, it was predicted that if no action was taken, the entire ozone layer would collapse by 2050, Georgiana Gilgallon, then the Future of Life Institute’s director of communications, told Vox’s Kelsey Piper in 2021. If this happened, marine ecosystems would be disrupted, and ultraviolet radiation exposure would cause increasing rates of cancer.
But now, thanks to collective global action kicked off by the Montreal Protocol in 1987 limiting the use of ozone-harming chemicals, the ozone layer is on track to fully recover by 2060, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
In 2019, Earth’s ozone hole was at its smallest since scientists began monitoring the area in 1982. In the following years, 2020 and 2021, the hole expanded, but this year, it shrank once more. As of 2022, the average size of the ozone hole had shrunk to approximately 8.91 million square miles, compared to an average of approximately 9.1 million square miles in 2020.
The shrinking ozone hole serves as proof that when international policies are enacted and followed, the future of our planet can be changed for the better. —Rachel DuRose
The FDA approves a form of cultivated, lab-grown meat
Upside Foods, a Bay Area-based startup, gained FDA approval last month to sell its cultivated chicken to consumers. While it still needs approval from the US Department of Agriculture before it can be sold to consumers, the FDA’s step brings such lab-grown meat one step closer to markets.
Cultivated meat is slaughter-free — it’s grown in a lab from animal cells in bioreactors, rather than harvested from a slaughtered animal. The end product is meat that tastes just like the real thing because, biologically at least, it is the real thing.
Once Upside Foods gets its USDA approval, it will partner with chef Dominique Crenn to bring cultivated chicken to Atelier Crenn, her acclaimed, three-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco. However, for cultivated chicken to make it from Michelin-star restaurants to the plates of everyday people, scalability must be addressed. As reported by Joe Fassler for The Counter, the industry still faces major technological and economic challenges, as well as a need for more public funding if it is ever going to reach price parity with factory-farmed meat. Vox’s Kenny Torrella has reported on whether hybrid meat (a blend of cultivated and plant-based) would be a possible solution to the scale problem.
The US won’t be the first in the world to get cultivated meat to consumers; Singapore has been selling cultivated meat chicken nuggets since 2020, and Israel is likely not far behind after granting $18 million to a cultivated meat consortium earlier this year. The FDA approval of Upside’s chicken comes months after President Biden’s executive order on biotechnology signaled support of cultivated agricultural technologies.
When NPR’s Allison Aubrey tried Upside’s cultivated chicken, she remarked, “It tastes like chicken,” to which Upside CEO Uma Valeti replied, “It is chicken!” Hopefully more people will be able to say the same soon. —Julieta Cardenas
Progress on affordable housing policy
In California, as of May, the median price of a single-family home was $898,980, and the required annual income to purchase such a home was $180,000, as journalist Ryan Lillis reported for the Sacramento Bee. There were approximately 173,800 unhoused people living in California, according to an October CalMatters analysis of data collected by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Those two facts are inextricably connected. As Jerusalem Demsas wrote recently for the Atlantic, a driving factor in homelessness is simply the high price of housing, which in turn is chiefly caused by too few places to live. One way to change that is to make it easier to build new housing or modify existing stock to allow more units.
That’s why it was good news that in 2021, to address California’s growing affordability and homelessness crisis, the state government passed the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act. The HOME Act, also called Senate Bill 9, allows homeowners to divide their single-family properties into as many as four individual units, and went into effect in 2022.
Despite criticism of the bill on the basis that it lowers surrounding property values, the University of California Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation estimated the law could potentially lead to the creation of 700,000 new homes. If implemented correctly, the law could serve as a model for other legislators looking to solve their respective states’ housing crises. —RD
Guaranteed income pilot programs proliferate across the US
Once thought of as a pipe dream, guaranteed income programs — which aim to give people “no strings attached” cash in order to mitigate poverty — are gaining more traction in the US. The growth this year includes groups like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a coalition of city leaders in favor of cash payments that now has 82 mayors on board across 29 states. The types of programs expanded as well, with nonprofits in Alachua County, Florida, giving formerly incarcerated people cash, while in California, unhoused students in 12th grade may be getting cash assistance to combat the “summer slump” to help them access higher education.
These pilot programs will directly help some people in need, while also generating evidence on the benefits of giving people money directly. While opponents have argued that many people would misuse direct cash payments, and that such programs would disincentivize work, those critiques are looking increasingly shaky. Guaranteed income increases employment, and people tend to buy what they need, according to the latest data tracking pilot programs by Stanford, UPenn, and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
Guaranteed income programs have been especially important for single and low-income parents. While such early efforts haven’t been enough to address the recent spike in child poverty, which rose by 41 percent when the expanded child tax credit ended earlier this year, they represent a move in the right direction.
Leading the way toward state policy is California, which intends to give over $25.5 million to seven pilot programs across the state. If successful, it’s entirely possible that other states, and perhaps one day the federal government, will devote more public funds to assist the most vulnerable without fiscal paternalism. Reducing the stress of poverty allows people to create more security for themselves and their families. —JC
The Inflation Reduction Act provided unprecedented funding for climate action
Despite its name, the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August, is likely the most significant piece of legislation to address climate change ever to come out of Congress.
The law devotes $369 billion — collected from funding sources such as a 15 percent corporate minimum tax rate, prescription drug pricing reform, and IRS tax enforcement — to ambitious policies that range from clean energy tax breaks to manufacturing batteries domestically.
Three separate analyses by Rhodium Group, Energy Innovation, and Princeton University are projecting a 40 percent cut in pollution from 2005 levels by 2030 as a result of IRA spending. The Inflation Reduction Act also created the US’s first methane fee, which will charge oil and gas companies a starting rate of $900 per metric ton of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. By 2026, that will increase to $1,500 per metric ton.
The Inflation Reduction Act further allocates $60 billion for environmental justice priorities, including several measures to address air pollution, improve quality of life, and provide affordable clean energy to disadvantaged communities. And in a big win for the agricultural sector, $20 billion will be used to make farmland more environmentally friendly, as approximately 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the US come from agriculture. This money will create habitats for pollinators, and aims to make farms more resilient as extreme weather continues to threaten crops.
2022 was the year the US proved that legislation centering climate action can pass — even if it needed to be framed as a measure to fight inflation. Now let’s see where 2023 will take us. —JC
Consensus is building in Washington that the most popular social media app among teenagers is a national security risk. How do you explain that to the app’s users?
Among the many items tucked away in the $1.7 trillion spending bill Congress is working to pass to fund the government next year is a small victory for enemies of TikTok: Users of government-owned phones and devices will not be allowed to install the video app and must remove it if installed.
The move, championed by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is mostly symbolic, my colleague Sara Morrison reported, since the app is already banned at a few agencies and departments, and would only apply to employees of the executive branch of government. “It doesn’t ban the app on phones of employees of other branches, like members of Congress or their staff,” she wrote. That means the handful of members of Congress, staffers, and interns who use the app to communicate with constituents or to share a behind-the-scenes look at how the federal legislature works may still be free to do so.
The executive branch ban would be the latest victory for the bipartisan wing of members of Congress who have been critical of the social platform for its Chinese ownership and potential cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (if it were to ask for user data). Reporting from The Verge and the New York Times this year backed up the concerns, finding instances of ByteDance employees having improper access to user data, including journalists. A BuzzFeed investigation also found that China-based employees of ByteDance accessed “nonpublic data about US TikTok users.”
At the same time, it foreshadows the challenge America’s (older) political class will have in trying to explain themselves to younger Americans — and future voters — if momentum to crack down on TikTok builds.
Both Republicans and Democrats, especially in the Senate, have expressed skepticism that TikTok’s China-based owner ByteDance is, or can remain, independent of the Chinese government, especially if the CCP tries to force the company to share data on its American users or spread propaganda and misinformation specifically to American audiences. Lawmakers like Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia (a Democrat) and Marco Rubio of Florida (a Republican) view that threat as a national security risk: Rubio has been vocal in pushing for bans of the app on government networks and Warner has advised parents not to let their kids use the app.
Much of the concern rests in TikTok’s unique audience: More than two-thirds of teens in the United States use the app, and young people under 30 make up a plurality of its user base, a larger share than Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit. Coincidentally, these people stand to comprise part of the majority of the new American electorate in the coming decade.
That makeup also poses a test for American lawmakers and their eventual campaigns: How do you explain to scores of young people who use this app every day why you want to ban their favorite app? Already, TikTok videos and comment sections are filled with debates over just how concerned users should be with a foreign government having information about them. Many conversations end with an agreement that privacy is worth the trade-off for access to the app and offer suggestions on ways to avoid a potential ban.
“They don’t like other countries collecting our data they just want American companies to collect data for the government,” one comment read on a reporter’s TikTok video explaining efforts to ban TikTok.
“You should [be concerned] if you look at what china is doing with tiktok,” another conversation starts on a video discussing a ban. “Please tell us what … they’re doing that Google, [YouTube] and Facebook aren’t doing,” another user responds.
On top of persuading younger users, how do you reach a generation of people who already don’t trust government, don’t feel connections to elected representatives, and are deeply misunderstood by the political class, while effectively eliminating one of the biggest avenues for reaching these people where they are?
Though a general ban on TikTok in the United States isn’t immediately on the horizon, efforts to scrutinize ByteDance have been accelerating this year, especially at the state level, where more than a dozen states have banned the app on government or public networks. What started as a lone effort by Rubio to have a federal agency investigate ByteDance’s purchase of TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly has now grown into a concern with bipartisan consensus, with support from lawmakers in both parties, both chambers of Congress, and both the last and current presidential administration.
But an obvious problem exists here. TikTok is hugely popular with young people, and the last time a wider ban was floated by Donald Trump in 2020, it didn’t go over well with young people, though evidence and skepticism have grown since then. Overall, data privacy concerns that older politicians invoke just don’t seem to worry young people, who are used to being tracked and surveilled. Teens, especially, are uniquely loyal to the app: Nearly 60 percent of teens report using the app every day, and about one in six use it constantly in a day. Large numbers of teens also say it would be hard for them to give up social media in general.
Coming out of a midterm year, plenty of candidates, political organizations, and youth voter outreach groups at the federal and local levels relied on TikTok to reach the millions of young people who use the app. “As long as that’s the game in play, you have to be in the arena,” Colton Hess, the creator of one of those outreach groups (called Tok the Vote) told the Associated Press in September. TikTok helped his voter registration efforts reach tens of millions, he said.
TikTok is also supposed to be the next frontier for candidates and campaigns to expand their reach with young people, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and co-founder of the progressive group Way to Win, told me when I talked with her about the lessons the 2022 midterms offered for reaching young voters.
“Young people get their information in very different ways, so it’s important that we actually reach out to those folks at the places where they actually get information,” she said. A handful of politicians are already doing this, but experts on young voters think more of this outreach needs to happen. “Investing in new media platforms, in social influencers on TikTok, who have audiences and want to be able to tell their audience about things, we have to invest in those people and support their work,” Ancona said.
Already in 2020 and 2022, Democrats like Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan, Sen. Ed Markey in Massachusetts, Sen. Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke used the app to increase their name recognition, talk about congressional politics, and participate in trends popular with young people. Many of them benefited from that recognition at the ballot box, winning strong majorities of voters under 30, the voting group least likely to turn out, to be loyal to political parties, and to trust politicians. How future campaigns, advocacy groups, and government leaders plan to reach these folks without a tool like TikTok remains to be seen.
Heading into a year of divided government, stricter regulation and restrictions on TikTok might be one of the few policies that moves forward with bipartisan support. Politicians would be wise to get out in front of young audiences early to explain this.