TikTok Isn’t Changing Political Views, a New Study Suggests
Campaigns are increasingly looking to TikTok to reach young voters. The effects aren’t necessarily positive, according to new research.
Research published in Political Studies Review in March found that college students who were exposed to TikTok content from political influencers reported experiencing more negative emotional states: anxiety, anger, depression and the like.
Perhaps even more striking: the content didn’t appear to have a noticeable influence on participants’ political positions, according to the study.
“What surprised us was that we didn’t really see any changes in political attitudes,” said Michelangelo Landgrave, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s authors. “However, concerningly, while engaging with TikTok, we did notice that a lot of their emotions had changed over the course of the week.”
The research paper, which was based on a weeklong study conducted in 2023 at the University of Missouri, provides a counterpoint to the growing notion among political consultants and campaigners that TikTok offers a key to persuading the millions of young people who use the popular video app.
Data published last year by Pew Research Center found that roughly 1 in 5 U.S. adults now regularly get news from TikTok – up from just 3 percent in 2020. Among adults under 30 years old, that percentage is even higher; 43 percent said they get news from the video app.
In an interview with Campaigns & Elections, Landgrave – who noted that he spoke only for himself and not the University of Colorado Boulder – raised concerns about what he said are the limitations of TikTok. Political content, he said, tended to focus heavily on emotional appeals rather than the presentation of facts. The short-form format of most content also leaves little room for nuance, he said.
As part of the study, political science students at the University of Missouri were split into three groups that were each fed different content on TikTok over the course of a week. One group watched Democratic-leaning political videos, one watched Republican-leaning content and a control group watched nonpolitical content – mostly “cute animal videos,” Landgrave said.
Landgrave and his fellow authors, Abdelaziz Alsharawy and Robert Anstett, didn’t produce the TikTok content shown to the participants. “These were all real TikToks produced by real users,” Landgrave said.
After that week, participants reported that the content did little to change their political attitudes. What did change, however, was their emotional states.
“While engaging with TikTok wasn’t changing their political attitudes or behavior, we did notice that a lot of their emotions had been changed over the course of the week,” Landgrave said. “Many of them showed more negative emotions – sadness, anxiety, anger and so forth.”
Landgrave acknowledged the limitations of the research. The study was conducted over the course of just one week, making it difficult to determine the long-term effects of TikTok usage on political views and emotional states. Landgrave said he’d like to conduct a similar experiment over the course of several months – even a year – to better study the impact of TikTok political content on young people.
Landgrave noted that TikTok, like other social media platforms, relies on users to produce content. “I don’t want to curtail anyone’s First Amendment rights,” he said. But he also argued that social media companies have a “duty” to implement better safeguards when it comes to younger audiences.
“I can’t blame TikTok as a corporation insofar as they’re not producing these videos themselves,” Landgrave said. “But I’m still concerned that they’re not trying to regulate it a bit more – trying to promote more nuanced videos on their platform, because they do have control over what gets watched through the algorithm.”
