TikTok Star Who Met With Jen Psaki Agrees White House Used Influencers as ‘PAWNS’

A popular TikTok user agreed the White House used influencers as “pawns” after a much-publicized Zoom meeting last month about the war in Ukraine.

Kahlil Greene, who goes by the name Gen Z Historian on the app, was among a number of TikTok influencers who participated in a meeting with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Taylor Lorenz with the Washington Post reported Psaki spoke to 30 influencers via Zoom on March 10. The White House enlisted them to help spread its “strategic goals” with relation to messaging on Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The White House is aware of the influence the app has on young people, and so the TikTok’s stars were enlisted to help stop the spread of “dangerous misinformation,” Lorenz reported.

Greene, in a post he wrote for Newsweek, said most of his fellow influencers ended up just parroting the Biden administration’s lines.

He said his own objective was to “hold the government to task.” He he wanted to come away from the meeting able offer his followers honest assessments about “how Americans could be incentivized to support Ukraine.”

He also said it’s “hard to argue against” criticism from conservatives the TikTok stars were being “used as pawns” by the White House.

“Most of the influencers were political commentators of some sort but after the briefing, I felt like a lot of the recaps from influencers were not critical,” he wrote. “They seemed to repeat exactly what the White House was saying.”

“When I saw a lot of the conservative fallout from the event, saying that people were being used as pawns by the White House,” he said. “It was hard to argue against that when the information being repeated about the session is just what we were told verbatim, without criticism.”.

“I had the assumption going in that other creators coming out of this event would all have the same level of journalistic integrity and criticism in creating their content,” Green concluded. “There were definitely some who did, but a lot of them didn’t.”

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