Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

Vijay, Darsana; Gekker, Alex

doi:10.1177/0002764221989769

Cited by 73 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Originally born as a lip-syncing app, TikTok is a social network aimed at creating and sharing short-form (15-30 seconds) mobile videos, which mainly take the form of lip-syncing, acting out, or dancing to songs or dialogs (Vijay;Gekker, 2021).…”

Section: Tiktok's Affordancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Cervi

Lladó

2021

EPI

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TikTok, already widely used before the pandemic, boomed during the quarantine that locked down large parts of the world, reaching 2 billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020. Of these 800 million users, 41% are aged between 16 and 24 years. This social network, widely known for its entertainment videos, is increasingly becoming a place for political discussion and therefore a unique opportunity for political actors to (re)connect with young people. Acknowledging that the political uses of TikTok are still understudied, this paper aims to explore whether and how Spanish political parties are including TikTok as part of their communication strategy. Through an affordance-centered content analysis of all the posts published by the five most important Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox), the current results show that, although all Spanish political parties have adopted this platform, their usage is unequal. From a quantitative perspective, PP was the first party to open a TikTok account, but its usage has been discontinuous; Podemos and Ciudadanos are the parties that publish the most and most constantly, while Vox has only published nine posts and the PSOE one. Nonetheless, from a qualitative perspective, Podemos and Vox generate more engagement and seem to understand and exploit TikTok’s specific affordances better. The findings allow it to be concluded that, although globally Spanish political parties do not fully exploit the platform’s affordances and tend to use it as a unilateral tool for promotion, the most engaging posts are those favoring interaction and geared toward politainment.

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Section: Tiktok's Affordancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Cervi

Lladó

2021

EPI

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“…They also looked at the role of celebrities taking part in TikTok challenges which consolidates their significance on TikTok and in mainstream culture. Other studies have looked at TikTok's political potential; a study by Vijay and Gekker (2021) looked at how TikTok shapes expression, in particular political expression. Likewise, Henneman (2020) looked at the uses and concerns of TikTok's journalistic storytelling ability.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

TikTok’s Spiral of Antisemitism

Weimann

Masri²

2021

Journalism and Media

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The growing presence of antisemitism on social media platforms has become more prominent in recent years. Yet, while most of the scholarly attention has been focused on leading platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the extremist immigration to other platforms like TikTok went unnoticed. TikTok is the fastest-growing application today, attracting a huge audience of 1.2 billion active users, mostly children and teenagers. This report is based on two studies, conducted in 2020 and 2021, applying a systematic content analysis of TikTok videos, comments, and even usernames. Data were collected twice, in two four-month periods, February–May 2020 and February–May 2021, to allow for comparisons of changes and trends over time. Our findings highlighted the alarming presence of extreme antisemitic messages in video clips, songs, comments, texts, pictures, and symbols presented in TikTok’s content. TikTok’s algorithm is even more disconcerting since it leads to a spiral of hate: it pushes users who unintentionally view disturbing content to view more. Considering TikTok’s young demographic, these findings are more than alarming; TikTok even fails to apply its own Terms of Service, which do not allow content “deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, or are intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people or include threats of physical violence”.

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“…The rise of TikTok has motivated a line of research in which its forms of communication have been studied (Schellewald, 2021), as well as its celebrity culture (Abidin, 2021), political communication and activism (Cervi & Marín-Lladó, 2021;Serrano et al, 2020;Vijay & Gekker, 2021), behaviors associated with their consumption (Cervi, 2021;Omar & Dequan, 2020), or how these are affected by the particularities of the functioning of the social network (Zulli & Zulli, 2020). At the same time, the first studies on news media's adaptation to TikTok have been developed (Vázquez-Herrero et al, 2020), issues such as misinformation and the role of fact-checkers in the social network have been addressed (Alonso-López et al, 2021) and specific cases have been studied such as how the media outlets have reported on Covid-19 on TikTok (Sidorenko-Bautista et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blurring Boundaries Between Journalists and Tiktokers: Journalistic Role Performance on TikTok

Negreira-Rey

Vázquez-Herrero

García

2022

MaC

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In recent years, media has adapted to the logic of each new social network to respond to renewed consumption habits and journalists have developed new roles on these platforms. TikTok is an emerging platform with its own influencer culture and in which the main audiences are the millennial and centennial generations. The main objective of this study is to analyze the presence of journalists on TikTok through the type of content and strategies used in adapting to this platform. The research is based on methodological triangulation. First, a database of journalists on TikTok (n1 = 212) was developed and the profiles were reviewed. Second, a questionnaire survey (n2 = 63) was developed. Finally, a content analysis (n3 = 520) of profiles exceeding 100,000 followers was conducted. This research provides a first description of the activity of journalists on TikTok, where a variety of roles, usages, and strategies are identified, beyond those of their profession. They join the of-the-moment platform with different purposes (to inform, entertain, or introduce themselves) and targets (new audiences, young people, fans). Journalists adapt their presence to the TikTok social media logic, seeking a space of influence on a platform that is the natural habitat of younger generations.

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Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

Cited by 73 publications

References 38 publications

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

TikTok’s Spiral of Antisemitism

Blurring Boundaries Between Journalists and Tiktokers: Journalistic Role Performance on TikTok

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