Binge-Swiping Through Politics

TikTok’s Emerging Role in American Government

Abstract

Social media has been used as a tool to spread political information since its creation, but its effectiveness has not been studied in depth. Older and wider known platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have been the focus of several academic studies, while newer platforms such as TikTok have been ignored. The guiding question of this study is, "does the social media platform TikTok inspire teenagers and young adults (13-20) to participate in political activities such as activism, voting, and educating themselves about political issues better than other social media platforms?" I hypothesized that TikTok usage would have a very strong correlation to political involvement of any kind. To answer the question, the study employed a mixed-method approach including a survey with 16 questions and an interview with TikTok content creators with 8 questions. The survey had 100 respondents and the interview had 6 respondents. This study found that TikTok had a stronger influence on teenage engagement in online political actions, especially learning about political issues. TikTok had a very small influence on teenage involvement in politics offline. Even though my hypothesis was only partially correct and TikTok doesn’t impact young people to vote as much as I expected, it still has a great value in society because it helps provide young people with the information they need to cast a well-informed ballot.