ANAHEIM, Calif.—The White House occupies a privileged spot on Washington’s map, but on social media, it's just another account vying for engagement, White House digital strategist Christian Tom said here at the VidCon conference.
"Are you guys getting screwed by the algorithm too?” News Not Noise founder Jessica Yellin asked Tom as some laughter bubbled across the audience.
“The White House, the president's account, doesn't have some special treatment," Tom replied.
Tom, brought on by President Biden in 2023 as director of the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, explained during his VidCon panel how he and colleagues—whom he called “a bunch of internet people” in “very much an old-school building”—operate on two tracks.
Their goal: “Have a presence in places where people spend their time.”
One of these tracks is the traditional social-media accounts with handles that stay constant across administrations and platforms: @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, and @LaCasaBlanca, for example. But, as Tom said, “Not everyone will necessarily follow The White House on YouTube.”
The number of available platforms has recently expanded to include Meta’s Threads and TikTok, even though Biden signed a bill that will ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner divest. (Yellin did not ask about that incongruity.)
The other track involves finding ways to convey the administration’s messages to content creators on these networks, many of whom are VidCon attendees and speakers.
“The way that people consume information today has rapidly changed,” Tom said. “Our office is built specifically to meet that demand and find ways to adapt as that consumer behavior has changed.”
He cast that as an unprecedented effort involving “new structures, new jobs inside the White House that did not exist before the Biden administration.” That may be selling President Obama short, since Biden’s Democratic predecessor hosted online town halls on Facebook and Twitter and hosted White House events for social-media influencers, such as a Maker Faire in 2014.
But the Biden administration has made social outreach more systematic and frequent, hosting news briefings for influencers on topics such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
At a separate VidCon panel on Thursday, Patrick Stevenson, deputy assistant to the president and senior advisor for digital strategy, called those briefings “a calculated risk,” saying “we're going to treat creators as if they are journalists and take a shot at that.”
In Friday’s panel, Tom said his office looks for “digital native creators who have picked up the mantle and are doing journalism themselves.” He cited another VidCon speaker, TikTok creator V Spehar from Under the Desk News, as one such example.
But the social ecosystem also includes many people looking to practice the opposite of journalism. That often takes the form of misleadingly edited or presented media that Tom called “cheapfakes.”
“It becomes really challenging to push back on something, as you know, when it starts to go viral,” Tom said, bringing up a case of a video from Biden’s visit to France for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that made it look like he was wandering away, lost, from other heads of state, when he was actually speaking to parachutists who had landed nearby.
With fact-checking by platforms often vulnerable to manipulation or still in development, Tom put in a plea for digital literacy, telling influencers in the crowd that “there should be a bit of an antenna that goes up” when something trending seems off.
“Go and find the livestream of the real event,” he asked. “Do the research on your own.”
Tom closed his 45-minute session by saying the administration aims to hear more from creators about their own concerns at a White House Creator Economy Conference on Aug. 14.
His sales pitch: “The goal at the creator economy conference is to highlight some of the really specific topics that affect everyone in this community.” Considering how many sessions here have had creators kvetching about issues like payouts for them, the role of AI and, yes, dealing with platforms’ recommendation algorithms, attendees should have a lot to talk about.