What happened to @KamalaHQ?

With over 5.6 million followers, 2.2 billion views, and more than 309 million total lifetime post “likes,” the Harris campaign’s viral @KamalaHQ account is one of TikTok's largest and most engaged political accounts. During the 2024 election, the account achieved viral success, catapulting “Brat Summer” into the consciousness and vocabulary of political elites and American teenagers alike. Throughout the fall, the account’s posts crescendoed to Election Day, with a dedicated team cranking out dozens of videos a week reaching tens of millions of Americans. Then, on November 5th, it came to a screeching halt. 

Today @kamalahq sits inactive and unused, a sad reminder of a more hopeful time. There have been no posts from the account since its final mashup video on November 5th. This is not entirely unexpected - Harris lost the election, and her campaign no longer employs staff. Political campaign social media accounts often disappear or go dark after Election Day, fading into the digital abyss. 

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the account was taken over by a different entity - maybe a PAC, advocacy group, media brand, or the DNC - and rebranded as an anti-MAGA news hub? That account would, in theory, be able to pick up where the Harris campaign left off, churning out high-impact anti-Trump content to reach millions of viewers daily. In both the political and corporate space, large social media accounts are taken over, transferred, sold, or rebranded all the time - it’s not hard to imagine the same thing being done to @kamalahq. 

I wanted to know if Harris and her team have thought about that possibility, and what’s the status of the account. Who even owns it anymore?

According to three sources close to the Harris campaign, the @kamalahq TikTok account remains under Harris’ control and ownership, and the former Vice President’s team is aware of the value of its social media assets. Instead of rebranding or transferring ownership of the account to a PAC or anti-Trump group, I’m told they are in a holding pattern, reserving the account for potential use in Harris’ next political campaign - either for Governor of California in 2026 or another presidential bid in 2028. 

“In a short 107 days, the Vice President captured lightning in a bottle, building a massive grassroots movement that lifted the hopes of millions of Americans,” one former Harris advisor told me. “The KamalaHQ accounts were among the most visible, successful, and fun parts of the campaign. As the VP and her family consider what’s next, she still has an army of grassroots supporters and these amazing assets in the KamalaHQ accounts in her quiver.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s political content operation on TikTok never stopped. While Trump’s “official” account (@realdonaldtrump) hasn’t posted since Election Day, his campaign account (@TeamTrump) posts about the President’s accomplishments and appearances multiple times a day. As Axios reported in February, the @TeamTrump accounts are managed by Trump’s leadership PAC, Never Surrender, under the stewardship of former Trump digital advisor Alex Bruesewitz.

Since January 1st, Team Trump’s content has received over 230 million views and 16 million likes on TikTok. It has become the most-viewed account for any political campaign or elected official on the platform.

Chart: Tuning into the news

According to new data from Pew Research Center, 71% of U.S. adults say they are “fairly closely” or “very closely” following news about the actions and initiatives of the Trump administration. That’s an increase from a similar survey taken at the start of the Biden administration, and 40% of Americans say they’re paying more attention to political news since Trump took office.

Those survey results generally align with the uptick in social media engagement for political accounts and news publishers that I saw in Q1.

More things you should read: 

• Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance on stage at Coachella, where he attacked Trump and urged attendees to get involved. Sanders has continued his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour this week, with enormous crowds in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City over the weekend. Last night, he turned out over 12,000 people in Nampa, Idaho.

• The corporate-owned legacy media continues capitulating to Donald Trump’s agenda: Last week, Nieman reported that the country’s largest newspaper chain would stop publishing its workforce diversity stats and has scrubbed its website of diversity-related language. 

• The Washington Post published some great visualizations examining Elon Musk’s interactions with major right-wing accounts on X. 

• The New York Times is continuing its quest to profile every personality on the top U.S. podcast charts, with a long read on the “Martyr Made” podcast’s Darryl Cooper published this week. Cooper, a self-made popular historian who lives in a log cabin in Northern Idaho, has become one of the most popular and controversial historians in this new era. 

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is on trial in a government anti-trust suit brought by the FTC. Casey Newton at Platformer has a good explainer here.

One last thing: Please don’t

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