TikTok influencer and OnlyFans star Farha Khalidi claimed in a recent podcast with commentator Richard Hanania that a third-party media company paid her to promote the Biden administration.
“I was doing full-on political propaganda,” Khalidi told Hanania, who is also president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
Khalidi claimed she had been approached by “a third party” whom she suggested “just wanted … some edgy girl of color” to influence people to look favorably upon the administration’s decisions. She said the requests came from a “media company that [was] doing it on [Biden’s] behalf” and was acting as a “conduit” for his administration.
Farha Khalidi on how surrogates for the Biden administration tried to pay her to engage in identity politics and sell their message.
A case of racial division as a top-down phenomenon. They're literally buying the TikTok influencers. pic.twitter.com/nJWGvsLlMu
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) April 26, 2024
Providing an example, Khalidi recounted that after Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court in February 2022, the company had asked her, “Can you say ‘as a person of color,’ you know, that you feel ‘reflected’?”
She said she told the representative from the company, “I’ll talk about the news of it, but I’m not gonna … have a white person tell me to be, like, ‘This is how I feel as a person of color.’… I think that black-pilled me slightly on political propaganda,” Khalidi said, according to The New York Post.
Khalidi also claimed that the third party told her, “Do not disclose this as an ad,” and “Technically, it’s not a product, so you don’t have to disclose it’s an ad.”
Near the start of the interview, Khalidi indicated that she was receiving payments from the Biden administration for ads by the time she graduated from college. However, she also said she declined the offer from the “so-called “conduit” to promote Brown Jackson. Many aspects of this unverified story are therefore unclear, including whether she ultimately took money from the alleged third-party media company and how much she may have made from any such purported deals.
A 2022 study by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications found that while using influencers to push political agendas could be effective, they must be chosen wisely. Research on how influencers impacted the Louisiana gubernatorial race in 2019 suggested that “controversial” figures should be avoided.
A clear-cut example of the potential pitfalls of choice in influencers is illustrated in the Bud Light controversy. After collaborating with a transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, the American beer giant was toppled from its long-held top spot in sales as a boycott broke out, leading to mass layoffs, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
There are currently no statements from the Biden administration either confirming or denying the use of TikTok or OnlyFans influencers to promote political agendas.
