Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won’t be onstage to answer questions at next week’s presidential debate, but he will be answering questions live on TikTok.
On Thursday night, a group of TikTok creators livestreamed a town hall meeting with Kennedy titled “America’s Sick.” For about an hour, Kennedy, a well-known anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist, answered questions from creators and followers about food and vaccine safety. Kennedy spoke at length about unfounded claims that vaccines and gluten can cause or worsen autism.
It was the long-shot independent candidate’s second town hall meeting with TikTok user Tiffany Cianci and her community. Cianci has become known over the past year for organizing livestreams with third-party campaigns and other creators. Thursday’s event was her fourth, and while it only drew a few thousand viewers, Cianci said her previous ones have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
“The first interview had almost 100,000 viewers and we only had two days notice,” said Cianci, who has more than 150,000 followers. “It was the first interview with Robert F. Kennedy. We didn’t really know what we were doing at the time. We were just flying blind.”
While Cianci handles most of the logistics, other creators are brought on as panelists to ask the candidates their own questions. The group of creators hosting Thursday’s town hall included two wellness accounts, a conspiracy theory channel, and two Homestead creators.
TikTok town halls aren’t all that different from the ones many candidates attend during their real-life campaigns. But instead of answering questions in a pizza place or a veterans hall, they’re run like giant Zoom calls, complete with technical glitches, and unlike town halls aired on news networks, creators, not journalists, are the ones vetting the questions and facilitating the conversation.
Though few of the creators have professional backgrounds in politics, they share a common skepticism of politicians and the system. The virtual events are meant to offer “real people” an opportunity to challenge candidates like Kennedy and hold future presidential candidates accountable ahead of the election.
“The point of this is to have politicians come directly onto our platform and have a conversation in a mainstream setting, rather than being moderated by mainstream media and having mainstream questions filtered and vetted,” one creator known as @cancelthisclothingcompany said on TikTok before Kennedy spoke.
Cianci, who was a franchise owner of Little Gyms, a gym for young children in Maryland, first met Kennedy last year when his campaign reached out to her to schedule a meeting about private equity. The campaign recorded the meeting and posted the video to social media. When Cianci and her fellow creators decided to start holding town halls, she reached out to Kennedy’s team for her first one.
Since first announcing his campaign last year, Kennedy has appeared on countless podcasts, spouting conspiracy theories and spending hours spouting his controversial opinions without fact-checking or refuting them. Despite the group’s plans to grill the candidate, Kennedy’s concerning comments were not refuted. Instead, panelists agreed with many, if not all, of what he said.
