What Mayo Pete can teach us: Just because a sizable portion of the audience can’t vote doesn’t mean that TikTok should be ignored. Viral content has a way of spreading across social-media platforms, and memes hold outsize sway in shaping public opinions and conversations online. Less than a year out from the election, none of the major Democratic candidates have cultivated a presence on TikTok. One media strategist told Vox that candidates could use it to bolster their approachability in much the same way that Instagram videos have redefined access to candidates. It’s also a clear, accessible way for candidates to apologize or clarify errors.

Case in point: Mayor Pete’s social-media snafus. Buttigieg committed not one but two major gaffes in the last few days. Over the weekend, Intercept reporter Ryan Grim reported that a woman in an image included in Buttigieg’s plan for the “empowerment of black America,” the Douglass Plan, was in fact Kenyan. Turns out the stock photo Buttigieg’s campaign used was chosen by a contracting firm “without knowing that it was taken in Africa.” And an Instagram post from 2017 on Buttigieg’s husband’s account recirculated online, showing the candidate posing at a Holocaust memorial in Berlin.