# Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Slapping Cats, Bopping Heads, and Oreo Shakes: Understanding Indicators of Virality in TikTok Short Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02452/) (2021)
- [Infer Induced Sentiment of Comment Response to Video: A New Task, Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06115/) (2024)
- [Will You Dance To The Challenge? Predicting User Participation of TikTok Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13384/) (2021)
- [Short Video Uprising: How #BlackLivesMatter Content on TikTok Challenges the Protest Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09946/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.