Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Supply Side of Social Video

Benjamin Guinaudeau, Kevin Munger, Fabio Votta

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

TikTok has rapidly developed from a punchline for jokes about “kids these days” into a formidable force in American politics. The speed of this development is unprecedented, even in the rapidly-changing world of digital politics. Through a combination of hashtag and snowball sampling, we identif y 11,546 TikTok accounts who primarily post about politics, allowing us to analyze trends in the posting, viewing and commenting behavior on 1,998,642 tiktoks they have uploaded. We test a number of theories about how the unique combination of af fordances on TikTok shapes how it is used for political communication. Compared to the dominant platform for political videos (YouTube) we f ind that a higher percentage of TikTok users upload videos, TikTok view counts are more dominated by virality, and viewership of videos are less dependent on a given accounts’ number of followers/subscribers. We discuss how these f indings af fect the production of content that ultimately determines the experience of TikTok consumers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)463-485
Number of pages23
JournalComputational Communication Research
Volume4
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Linguistics and Language

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