Trump’s “get them” comment was history. Now TikTok is showing young voters.

It’s been eight years since the leaked audio of a conversation between Donald Trump and TV host Billy Bush sparked outrage over the former president’s descriptions of kissing and groping women without their consent.

Now, young people are encountering the tape for the first time on TikTok, where users share videos of their reactions and, in some cases, reach a large audience.

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Many of the first-time voters were teenagers in 2016, when The Washington Post first reported the incident, in which the former president appeared to endorse sexual assault during a backstage conversation on the set of “Access Hollywood,” when he did not realized. his microphone was on. Despite widespread criticism of Trump’s comments at the time, he went on to win the 2016 presidential election and the mainstream news cycle continued.

Now, the generation that came of age during the #MeToo era is turning to social media for information about candidates and elections — 39 percent of young adults say they frequently get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. This week, many took to social media to say they were shocked by the former president’s words and confused as to why the episode wasn’t a dealbreaker in 2016.

“I don’t think any of my friends heard it,” said Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old college student from Ohio, who first heard the tape on her TikTok For You feed this week. “We were all equally shocked.”

People her age have less tolerance for sexual misconduct after growing up amid a series of high-profile harassment and assault cases involving high-profile celebrities, Sullivan said. She immediately felt compelled to share the audio in her own video, with the caption, “Fathers vote for this man.” The video has been viewed 2.5 million times and was re-shared by singer Billie Eilish to her 68 million followers.

Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old from Georgia, knew Trump had been accused of making sexist comments, she said. But she’d never heard the words he actually said, including the “grabbing her pussy” quote. She “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.”

She made her own video of Trump’s audio in the hope that her voting-age school friends would see it.

“I’m around a lot of (18-year-olds) on my sports team and I thought maybe I could show them who to vote for,” she said. Some people came up to her at school saying her TikTok was the first they’d ever heard of tape.

This election season, the campaigns of Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have run extensive operations on TikTok, both posting to their own accounts and paying influencers to reach the video app’s large share of Gen Z and millennial users. Notably, TikTok is the only platform that confirmed to The Post that users can use the word “vote” in their videos without being taken down. But neither candidate can control the narrative in the app’s algorithmic feed, where videos rise to viral fame regardless of whether they’re related to the current news cycle.

The infamous tape surfaced about a month before the 2016 presidential election and sparked a crisis within the Republican Party, which was already grappling with Trump’s insurgent campaign. Trump apologized for his comments in the video, but also tried to downplay them as “locker room fights.”

A number of prominent Republicans have announced they are no longer supporting Trump, and some have even called for him to end his candidacy. The Republican speaker of the House at the time, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, said he was “appalled” by the tape and told colleagues he would no longer defend Trump.

Now, Trump is running for president with the support of the Republican Party. But in the internet age, content never dies. Some social media users have to carefully manage their so-called digital footprints to avoid retaliation from their colleges, workplaces or social circles. The same goes for public figures. In July, for example, the personal blog that vice presidential candidate JD Vance kept while in college made the rounds on X.

Social media news cycles often take their cues from evocative posts and videos rather than mainstream media.

“Thanks to social apps, things that weren’t necessarily relevant in one election cycle can come back to haunt in subsequent election cycles,” said Jeffrey Blevins, a professor of journalism and political science at the University of Cincinnati.

Some of the most popular TikTok “Access Hollywood” came from older users hearing Trump’s comments for the first time. But for people like Sullivan, who will vote for the first time in Tuesday’s election, the discovery cast both the 2016 and 2024 elections in a new light.

Did people know about the gang before they voted in 2016?, she asked a Post reporter.

Yes, the tape came out before election day.

“I just got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about it and he still won is pretty wild to me.”

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Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.