Fox's TikTok account is growing, driven largely by non-Fox content
The Chaotic Era reported that Fox News’ TikTok account has added over 10 million followers in the last 18 months. Media Matters found that much of that growth seems to have come from content sourced from outside Fox News.
Written by Jack Winstanley
Research contributions from Kayla Gogarty
Published
After Kyle Tharp reported in the Chaotic Era newsletter on Fox News’ recent surge in popularity on TikTok, Media Matters reviewed Fox’s top TikTok content and found about half consist of clips sourced from outside Fox News. Those videos generated nearly twice as many views as content that came from Fox’s news coverage and programming.
Tharp, an independent writer and researcher, found that over the last 18 months, the network's presence on TikTok has exploded, at least partially due to an increase in post frequency.
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.
Media Matters looked at Fox News’ “popular” page on TikTok on May 29 at 11:30 a.m. ET and reviewed the top 50 posts, all of which were posted during the 18-month period analyzed by Chaotic Era and determined the sourcing for the content. We found that the majority, or 26 videos, seemed to come from sources other than Fox or were not presented as Fox content. These videos consisted of content from social media users, CCTV footage, police footage, and footage from government officials. They included footage of “huge swarms of locusts” in the Sahara desert, a “restaurant owner surviv[ing] a knife attack,” “a man allegedly attempting to grab a one-year-old girl,” a “tow truck driver [who] was arrested after allegedly taking a car with a 4-year-old child still inside,” and “the terrifying moment a truck went airborne and slammed into a home.”
Another 24 TikTok posts, or 48% of the top 50 analyzed, consisted of Fox News programming and news coverage — such as show commentary, interviews, and live breaking news — or seemingly raw footage of news and political events with Fox logos overlaid on top. These posts included footage of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, a shooting during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and the Iran war.
The 26 videos on its TikTok account seemingly sourced from outside Fox News earned a total of over 1.2 billion views and over 51 million likes, outpacing engagement on Fox’s top content with network programming and news coverage. They accounted for two-thirds of views earned on the top 50 analyzed and 60% of their likes. Comparatively, the 24 posts with Fox programming and news coverage earned over 629 million views and more than 34 million likes.