What’s Political on TikTok? Perceptions, Prevalence, and Patterns of Exposure to TikToks Users Perceive as Political

Abstract

As its popularity soars across the U.S., TikTok has begun to draw criticism pertaining to political content on its platform. We conducted a study of 366 participants who used our browser-based tool to annotate videos from their personal TikTok feeds, marking those they perceived as political and briefly explaining why. We analyze the resulting data both qualitatively and quantitatively to answer three research questions investigating perceptions, prevalence, and patterns of user exposure to political content on TikTok. We answer these questions through qualitative coding of participants' responses, measuring rates of exposure to content users perceive as political, and running statistical tests to analyze patterns of overall and topic-specific exposure in relation to participant attributes. We developed a codebook with 32 political topics present in participant descriptions of political content, find that perceived-political content comprises 16.85% of participants' feeds on average, and that participants' age and interest in politics are associated with higher overall exposure to perceived-political content while gender and political ideology are associated with exposure to topic-specific content about gender and sexuality rights. We conclude with implications for user-centered studies of TikTok and other social media platforms, and directions for future work.