Getting paid to talk politics

A conversation with TikTok’s Cassie Wilson.

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On August 27,

Taylor Lorenz

published a piece in Wired about Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal marketing platform that pays a cohort of creators up to $8,000 a month to make political videos in support of the Democratic agenda—without being required to disclose this partnership, and without necessarily knowing where the money is coming from in the first place. I’m not sure what your TikTok looks like, but this article absolutely blew up mine, so much so that the conversation got far away from the actual point. And maybe that’s because the question at the heart of this piece doesn’t seem to have any good answers. Should Democrats play the same game as Republicans (who have been running similar programs for much longer) at the expense of transparency, or should they eschew these tactics at the expense of potential success?

I genuinely don’t know where I fall on this, but I wanted to talk to someone who has actual skin in the game. Comedian Cassie Wilson is not part of the aforementioned Chorus cohort, but she did, following the article’s publication, share with her audience that she, too, has taken undisclosed political partnerships.

@cassiewillsoni wanna know what you think about all of this! i have a million more thoughts. liberal dark money content leftist progressive political funding

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Cassie and I got on Zoom last week to talk about the reactions to this piece, her experience behind the curtain, and if the left is getting in its own way.

Would you describe yourself as a political creator?

Only in the past year or so have I turned more political, and that was mostly in response to Trump getting reelected. There was a lot of conversation about how we need more and louder voices on the left online, because this was the “podcast election” and the right has such a stronghold on podcasts and online media. So I thought, well, okay, I can do that. I can be a voice and mostly use humor to talk about some leftist stuff. I don't consider myself a political content creator. I think there's a whole other world out there of people traveling to DC to interview Congress members and I don't do that. I am just a girl in my room in New York making stuff that I think about.

But some of the most prominent voices on the right were people just sitting in their rooms talking. And then they get rewarded. I did an interview with Hasan Piker after the election and explained how the infrastructure on the right: Someone starts making videos, and then other people who want to elevate them funnel money to them. And that is so much harder to recreate on the left, in part because often the messaging of the left is things like, "There shouldn't be billionaires." And so there are no billionaires saying, "I'd love to fund this."

Totally. The sources of funding are in direct opposition to leftist ideals. So very rarely will those things align.

This is why I find this conversation really complex, because when this Wired piece came out, there seemed to be an overall negative reaction to the idea of people being funded to make political videos. You're not part of this creator network, but you shared that you have made paid videos that are political. Can you say a bit more about that?

Sure. I have twice taken undisclosed political paid deals. This is literally from the doc that I got: “An independent political action committee [a PAC] is working to defeat Donald Trump this November and needs your help. Their goal is to recruit and activate non-political creators like you to speak out about critical political issues, inspiring dialogue, and mobilizing Gen Z and millennials to save democracy and vote against Donald Trump.” And this just goes on and on and on, but it was Halloween themed, like some of the horrible things that could happen under Trump. And this is like five pages long, but I think one of them was reproductive health. It would be really scary tracking pregnancies. And so I took that one.

And it was a lot of money. It was $6,000, 20% of which goes to my agency. And so for me it's $4,800, the most I had ever been offered for a one-off deal, and I think still the most I've ever made from a one-off deal. And it was like, "Hey, you don't have to disclose that this was paid." And that was brand new for me. And I was like, "That's kind of weird, but okay." And this was when I was actually just about to quit my full-time job to move into freelance content and comedy full-time. So I was like, this makes a lot of sense to me to make a video because I certainly don't want Trump to get reelected. This is something I care about, and I'm getting offered money. I know that this is happening on a huge scale across the internet. I didn't really see a reason to say no. And if I could go back today, yeah, maybe I would rethink that.

This video that I made a couple days ago talking about this Wired piece and the larger conversation around it, somebody commented and said, like, "Imagine if you'd said no, it would've been a much better story." It's like, okay, well. I didn't. That's not what happened. I'm trying to be transparent, you know? I'm answering people in the comments and saying if this offer came in today, I would be way more likely to disclose that this was paid. And this is where all of the questions come in about, who is the perfect leftist? What is the best way to be a leftist in Donald Trump's America in 2025? Like, does that mean you don't engage at all with the Democratic party? Does that mean you engage as much as you personally believe is right?

All of these things are on such a spectrum and everyone's morals are gonna misalign. If I'm an online leftist commenter, and I learned that a liberal content creator whose ideas I don't necessarily agree with a hundred percent of the time has taken dark money, what does that mean? And those reactions have been just so all over the place. Some people are like, “Yeah, they should get paid to say what they think.” And some people are like, “it means they're bad and they're shills and this is why the liberals always end up with the fascists.” And it's like, where does that get us?

Someone being like, "Wouldn't it have been a better story if you said no?" I'm like, well surely, whatever you feel about people being paid, I don't understand how the better option is to not take an opportunity to speak out about something you believe in.

Right. If I say no, would you rather it go to someone else whose ideas maybe you don't agree with as much as mine? My beliefs are very leftist, but I'm also a realist. And just because I don't think something should be happening doesn't mean it's not happening.

I guess the feeling is that someone is saying something that they don't believe, and is just getting paid to say it?

That's the tricky thing. I think a lot of people feel this sense of betrayal. Because people want authenticity from the people that they watch online. But even that is a gray area. If somebody on TikTok makes a video talking about ideas they do genuinely believe in, but if they stretch that out to be one minute so that they get paid from the creator fund, does that mean it's immoral? Does that mean it's inauthentic? Because, you know, TikTok, it could be argued, is a platform that does harm. Facebook certainly could be argued does harm. I'm still posting my stuff on Facebook and I'm getting paid by Facebook because, frankly, those are the platforms that exist. That is where the audience lives. I would rather people hear what I have to say than not. And that is what every creator, every writer, every comedian, every performer believes on some level, that they have something to say that is worth listening to.

And so I have a lot of trouble believing that anyone is taking money to say something that they don't believe in. And maybe that is idealistic of me. But I think especially in the liberal, progressive, leftist space, I don't think a lot of people are taking money to say things they don't believe in.

You also mentioned that you were transitioning into doing this full time, and you have to be able to support yourself. And again, why wouldn't you support yourself by making a video that you believe, that you maybe would already make?

I think that question's worth asking. There are people who have commented on my videos saying, "If you took that money and you didn't disclose that, that means you're not a true leftist." Okay. You can think that. You don't see everything that a person is doing. You don't see that I've been canvassing every week since December for Zohran Mamdani, and that's not paid. You know what I mean? So it's like, if I take two politically funded undisclosed videos over five years, I don't think that outweighs all of the other work that I am doing and all of the other work that other leftists can be doing. And some of these people, the liberals and the progressives who are making these videos, maybe they're getting paid by Chorus, even if I don't a hundred percent agree with someone who more identifies as a liberal and has a little bit more faith in the Democratic party, I would so much rather they exist than not exist. Because there's an audience for it. I would rather their audiences be watching their videos than some horrifying right wing person.

You mentioned you're leftist, but you're also a realist. And I think that's where I fall too, where it's just like, okay, if we don't do this, then one side is gonna continue to dominate the space. And there is no real scrutiny happening on the other side in a way it is here. And it sometimes feels a little bit like perfect is the enemy of good.

I think the question people can ask is like, is the message more important than the medium? And the reality is that the medium, the medium being short-form content or podcasts or whatever, that does include undisclosed political funding. I don't think that is a super important thing to focus on in the media landscape. We all know that it's happening. If you wanna have the conversation about media, it's like, okay, media literacy, teaching people how to identify things that might be AI generated that might be politically motivated. But the other really tricky thing about this article and about this whole conversation is like, if the problem is that people are getting paid to not say things and they're not allowed to legally disclose if they're involved in something, that creates the three-spidermans-holding-the-gun-at-each-other meme. I've gotten comments on my video that are like, “You were probably paid to make this video.” And how do I disprove that to you? If the whole accusation is that everyone is lying, everyone is obfuscating the truth, where do we go from here? Who can we trust anyway?

The right has been working to create this very moment, starting all the way back with “fake news” and sowing distrust in traditional media. Because this allows their voices to dominate. And I think that's honestly what has been more frustrating for me in this discourse is we are doing exactly what was intended, which is now no one on the left trusts anyone.

And the whole point of being a leftist is that we need everyone. So this is a really tough place to be. The online discourse has just gotten so ugly and so fractured. I saw this video from a creator just railing against this other creator who is a novelist, a writer, and very much a leftist, is doing the praxis, is redistributing a lot of funds in a very public, noted way. This person made a video just railing against her because she had sold her novel to Penguin Random House, and was using that as evidence that she was manipulating her audience. Sorry. What are we doing here? Would you rather she not publish the book at all? Does she self-publish? Well, okay, what if she sells it on Amazon? What happens there? Does profiting off of your art, your ideas, your output at all mean you're a bad leftist? Because guess what, babe? We live in capitalism. We all have to survive.

And there needs to be—speaking of Zohran, he did that scavenger hunt and I remember his response to criticism of it was that there's room for joy in politics. And I do think that is a huge thing that's been downplayed, because somehow joy has been branded as something where you can't also be holding space for tragedy. And it's like, again, the other side has a lot of joy in, in my opinion, cruelty.

And ignorance.

Right? And so we have to allow for joy and we have to acknowledge, like you said, that like under capitalism, that might mean money. That might mean financial success. But the goal is still to trust each other and uplift each other.

What people kept coming back to in my comments is the transparency. People have a right to know when they're being sold a product. Legally you do have to disclose hashtag #ad. But when you're being sold an idea rather than a product, that is different. And that is the legal gray area. And my agency specifically said, "You do not have to disclose this," and I trust them.

In an ideal world, yes, we can all be transparent, but—and this happens with products, too—the moment there's “#ad,” people's belief in the credibility of what that person's saying, whether they know it or not, drops. And so it's like, you want to present the information that you really believe in as effectively as possible, but if you end it with something like "paid for by whatever," people would not, I think, react the way they say they would.

The second undisclosed political paid thing that I did was back in the spring, it was way less money. And it was, “Hey, we want you to make a video about how Elon is bad and DOGE is bad.” And I genuinely had already had this idea before I got this reach out of like, what if I do a video where it's like "POV: I'm on a date with someone from DOGE. " Because there are all these 25-year-old frat boys who are doing untold damage to our economic and social safety nets. And so I already had that idea and I was like, "Oh my God, perfect. I'll just make this sketch." I had to add in a couple talking points that to me felt a little clunky, but genuinely I was going to make that video anyway. Does it really matter if I got paid $1,300? And for some people, that's really gonna matter to them. Okay. It sounds like you can't consume any media.

Right. You're gonna watch a movie and get really mad when you find out why a bag of Doritos is in the frame.

Hundred percent. Or learn that the executive producer of that movie, they were in the IDF, you know what I mean? There is no media you can consume that does not have some kind of angle.