What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case

Abstract

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.

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

“…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).…”

Social Media and Political Communication of Youth Political Organisations in Slovakia, Czechia and European Level: A Cross-Case Analysis

“…Looking at up to date research, we find mainly data reflecting communication of political parties (López-Meri et al 2017;Cervi and Marín-Lladó 2021), specific authorities or local governments (e.g., Haro-de-Rosario et al 2018), or individuals/politicians (e.g., Gerodimos and Justinussen 2014;Bossetta 2018). However, as we mentioned above, there is currently no research on the political communication of a specific type of political organization, namely youth organizations, which only underscores the importance of this study.…”

“…Brunnerová and Charvát (2017) state, based on their follow-up of nine journals over the course of 8 years, that the authors' interest in new media has increased in recent years. On the one hand, the interest of scientists has focused on specific social media in the context of political communication, such as Facebook (e.g., Gerodimos and Justinussen 2014;Ceccobelli 2018), Twitter (e.g., Cervi et al 2021a;López-Meri et al 2017) or newer communication tools such as TikTok (e.g., Cervi et al 2021b;Cervi and Marín-Lladó 2021), as well as for comparative or at least simultaneous monitoring of several social media platforms (e.g., Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan 2012;Bossetta 2018;Haro-de-Rosario et al 2018). In a large group of these studies, the interest is the presence of specific political actors or using communicated content analysis to find out how they are used.…”

Exploring Stress and Problematic Use of Short-Form Video Applications among Middle-Aged Chinese Adults: The Mediating Roles of Duration of Use and Flow Experience

“…First, we collected data only from China. Given that SVAs usage has become prevalent in many countries across the world [ 80 , 81 ], the one-country-based design has limited capacity to understand this global phenomenon. Accordingly, in the future, researchers could conduct comparative research regarding the problematic use of SVAs between different countries.…”