News on TikTok: An Annotated Dataset of TikTok Videos from German-Speaking News Outlets in 2023

Abstract

TikTok has emerged as a leading social media platform with increasing relevance for the consumption and distribution of news, especially for younger age groups. Despite its growing relevance, analyses of how traditional news outlets produce content for the platform and maintain journalistic news values are limited. Moreover, there are few large-scale datasets that are suitable for tracing larger journalistic trends and developing approaches for the automated annotation of multimodal content. This paper addresses these gaps and introduces “News on TikTok,” an annotated dataset of 8,623 TikTok videos published by 18 major German-speaking news outlets in 2023. Combining metadata with human-annotated data of 25 variables (incl. the presence of visual, auditory, and interactive elements, and journalistic news values), our dataset makes three significant contributions: First, it enables extensive analyses of news characteristics on TikTok. Second, it provides ground truth data to develop and validate automated tools for multimodal content analyses. Third, it offers a comprehensive guide for generating datasets with similar research interests.