This might be TikTok’s first general election, but it probably won’t be the first election decided by it for one simple reason: British users of the video app are likely to already vote for the Labor Party.
“The problem is that almost everyone on TikTok is already on our side,” said a Labor campaign source. “We need to reach undecided voters.”
TikTok’s relatively young user base and Labour’s huge lead in polls among younger voters have given the app an odd role in this election. There is no doubt that tens of millions of Britons consume election content on the platform. It’s a great place for memes to spread, embarrassing videos to go viral, and passionate political opinions to find an audience. And all parties feel they have to commit to it.
However, it is also seen within the Labor Party as an unreliable way of delivering Keir Starmer’s central messages on economic or educational policy to the “Women of Whitby” and other precise groups of undecided voters who will decide dozens of marginal constituencies. in the United Kingdom.
Even being on TikTok is a strong indicator that someone is already willing to vote Labour, according to research by Deltapoll. They found that TikTok users are 31% more likely to vote for Keir Starmer’s party than people of the same age and background who do not use the video app.
“The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that you are more likely to be a Labor voter if you use TikTok,” said Mike Joslin, a veteran digital activist who commissioned the research for his artificial intelligence startup Bombe. “Other channels offer more control to reach undecided voters.”
TikTok is undoubtedly culturally powerful in the UK: 45% of British internet users use the app for an average of 28 minutes a day, according to Ofcom. Anyone who has seen the lines outside a TikTok viral restaurant or store knows that the app can have a substantial real-world impact and change behavior. Although the stereotypical user is Generation Z, their audience is actually aging, with much of their recent growth coming from 30-somethings.
Joslin said the app has become “essentially television,” with users endlessly scrolling through videos without necessarily interacting: “You can reach 10 million people, but what’s the impact on actual voter intent? “Rather than necessarily being a tool to persuade voters, it’s more of a tool to mobilize voters.”
One of the biggest challenges is that TikTok runs on an opaque recommendation algorithm that is incredibly difficult for political activists and journalists to monitor. This means that even determining which videos are popular will inevitably focus on what the parties are doing on their official accounts, although much of the conversation happens elsewhere and is largely unseen.
Older social networks, such as X and Facebook, were built around the concept of following people and sharing content, such as links to news, in a way that could be tracked and monitored. TikTok focuses on a powerful algorithm that determines which users might enjoy certain content and then provides them with an appropriate stream of videos.
The end result is very unpredictable and not always useful for a political campaign. A member of the public with no following who makes a particularly engaging political video (such as the million people who watched footage of David Cameron through a doorbell while campaigning in Hampshire) will beat a carefully constructed official post by an official channel (such as (the 40,000 people who watched Rishi Sunak answer a question about agriculture on the official Conservative Party account).
According to a Labor activist, the aim of the party’s TikTok strategy is to get younger people to download videos (as a post comparing Rishi Sunak to a card from the game Magic the Gathering) then post them to WhatsApp family groups. In this way, they said, TikTok content can reach undecided voters: “The strategy is not to target young people, but to share it outside the platform to reach friends and family.”
