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If a week is a long time in politics, the five-year gap between British elections is an eternity. The political landscape has changed dramatically since the Conservatives’ landslide victory in 2019, but so has the social media landscape.
In 2019, TikTok was, according to a Guardian article, “a video-sharing app that has become incredibly popular among teenagers.”
Fast forward to 2023 when, according to an Ofcom survey, 10% of people aged 16 or over said they got their news from TikTok, ahead of BBC Radio 1 and on par with The Guardian, and up significantly from 1% in 2020, after the last election.
And while some say the so-called battle over TikTok is overblown, the platform’s creators are well aware that there is an audience for political content among TikTok users, young and old.
To help understand how the 2024 election unfolded on TikTok, we monitored the platform using four separate accounts for one hour a day over a week, looking for the widely used hashtag #ukpolitics and campaign-specific hashtags and terms.
A few caveats before we begin: no one outside of TikTok knows how its algorithm works, and we don’t know if it can be manipulated to boost certain content (and if so, how).
The platform is also notoriously difficult to measure. It doesn’t have a “most popular” section, meaning our sample was just that: a snapshot of what we saw on the site for an hour each day during a week of the campaign.
TikTok stripped bare: “traditional” news for a new audience
If you’re under the impression that TikTok is all about dance fashion, lip-sync challenges and makeup tutorials, then you’re right… but you’ll also discover some familiar faces, including BBC and ITV news presenters, LBC radio presenters and broadcast journalists.
Traditional media outlets including television broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Sky News), newspapers (The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail) and radio stations (LBC and Greatest Hits Radio) have all taken advantage of the platform as part of their election offerings.
In general, these organizations are repackaging their news content into bite-sized chunks preferred by the platform, sometimes led by younger journalists who anchor, summarize the day’s news, or do vox popping.
However, some media outlets are publishing content with a more native tone. The Daily Mail lives up to its bio (“Seriously Popular”), attracting the most engagement (defined as the sum of an account’s “likes,” shares, and comments”) per video in the video content captured in our feed.
Metro’s strategy also proved successful: its flagship account, metrouk (“We give the people what they want”) enjoyed the highest number of views per video and the second-highest engagement captured in our sample.
A secondary Metro account, alrightgov, ranked seventh in terms of engagement in our overall sample, posting video snippets in response to the question posed in its bio: “What the hell is going on in the House of Commons?”
Overall, among the 339 “traditional news” videos posted after the election was called on May 22 and delivered to us in our week on TikTok, these posts averaged 245,000 views per video, though they scored much lower in engagement, at 14,000 per video.
IB TikTok: The Rookie Newsmakers
There is also a TikTok news content section which is definitely… IB (inspired by) the platform’s own content.
Some were accounts that emerged from the platform, so they are native to it. Others had a disruptive presence in the media landscape before joining the platform. But in both cases, this type of content tends to feel much more at home on TikTok.
Among this last disruptive subcategory, the most important is Politicsjoe, a branch of José website and its associated social accounts, which ranked 13th in our sample for views and engagement per video, and within the top 10 news providers.
While Politicsjoe doesn’t enjoy the blistering results of the Metro and Mail accounts, its content rivals the Telegraph, BBC and LBC TikTok accounts for views, and ranks above ITV’s.
And it’s not alone: news disruptors, which typically publish a mix of news and infotainment, that featured prominently in our snapshot include News Movement and Novara Media.
A word here too for podcasts like The Rest is Politics and The News Agents, which attracted a good number of views and engagement on their election-related posts.
Native creators: individuals who post about politics
The 2024 election campaign has generated numerous controversies, but very few surprises. The exception to this rule has been Nigel Farage’s apparent infiltration of the youth platform and the apparent popularity of the Reform UK party among 18-24 year olds in several polls.
Our sample indicates that engagement with right-wing content on the platform extends to individuals and not just politicians.
Of the top 20 individual creators (ranked in terms of views per video), 13 were right-wing or right-leaning content creators, compared to five from the left of the political spectrum; the rest were neutral in their opinions expressed in election-related posts.
Right-wing accounts also tended to attract more engagement (likes, shares, and comments). When ranked by engagement, eight of the top 20 individual creators promoted right-wing candidates or viewpoints compared to just four left-wing creators, though it should be noted that engagement here does not equate to support.
Among the best-performing accounts in terms of individual electoral content was that of former Ukip leader Henry Bolton.
Ahead of this election, the Labour Party appealed to TikTok: “The problem is that almost everyone on TikTok is already on our side,” a campaign source told the Guardian.
And – unsurprisingly for a youth-oriented platform – the leftist politics of certain accounts actually play well.
The most popular account we captured, thechampagne_socialist, posted six election-related videos in the period analyzed, gaining more than 40,000 views per video and more than 6,300 interactions for each posted content.
Other TikTokkers who posted content that leaned more left (or at least reveled in conservatives’ low viewership ratings) and who were also among the top 20 accounts in our sample of individual creators were leftbrainuk and mrcodydahler, but these two and thechampagne_socialist were outdone by right-wing or right-leaning content creators.
Despite the tendency of some of the creators mentioned above to show their biases, there are still corners of TikTok where creators do their best to live up to their audience.
They include TikToker Chris Chandler, who shares news on his account Newswithchrisofficial, the account bestvidsukgb which primarily posts funny videos, and Louis, a college student in his final year who runs the account instanational_elections.
The PoliTikTokkers: the parties and candidates that are triumphing on TikTok
Although TikTok presents itself as an entertainment app, recent elections outside the UK show how the platform is being used for political campaigns.
Far-right parties are having some success in attracting younger voters. Quarter of 2019 MEPs cohort with TikTok accounts They were part of the European right-wing and far-right political groups.
Alternative for Germany (AfD), which enjoyed unprecedented support in the recent European elections, has dominated The format of the platform to publish short and emotional videos.
Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which could become the largest force in the French parliament, has been described as the King of TikTok in French politics.
It is therefore not surprising that, in capturing content using the election-related hashtags #ukpolitics and terms, we also absorbed a large amount of content created by (or at least on behalf of) politicians.
And while the Labour and Conservative posts captured in our sample did well in both views and engagement, what was more worrying for the Liberals was the frequency with which reform candidates appeared, accounting for seven of the top 13 political accounts.
However, we cannot understand why certain posts and accounts perform better than others on the platform.
“TikTok’s search engine displays personalized results, making it difficult to understand what users are actually seeing on their screens. Moreover, the algorithm recipe behind these search engines is kept secret,” says Salvatore Romano, research director at the non-profit organization AI Forensics.
Conspiracy theorists
We found very few stories that circulated conspiracy theories, at least in the sample we collected, but they did exist.
We’re not going to help conspiracy theorists by amplifying their videos more widely on this platform, but topics we saw included the fictional claim that the Labour Party would introduce sharia law if it came to power.
Again, we cannot know why we were shown this content, although AI Forensics warns that such content may be amplified by the “secret recipe” hidden in the platform’s algorithm.
“Since engagement can be both positive and negative, polarizing discussions around extreme views, and even hate speech, can boost engagement metrics,” Romano said.
At least three accounts we originally flagged for containing conspiracy tropes were removed during the course of our investigation, though we cannot say whether this was of their own volition or whether they were removed by TikTok.
