Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremist TikTok Accounts and User Engagement

• In Event: Transcending Platforms and Domains: Exploring the Cognitive-Physical Nexus

Abstract

TikTok has the potential to expose users to content created by political extremists, defined as those who subscribe to fringe, often violent, right-wing (RW) or left-wing (LW) ideologies (O’Connor, 2021). Extremist social media users often leverage trending audio and humor (Weimann & Masri, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021) to increase the chances users will stumble upon their videos. Videos’ reach and consequences are further heightened when they contain moral appeals, as moralized content is more likely to be both shared online (Brady et al., 2020), and to instigate behaviors, including violence, in observers (Skitka & Morgan, 2014). TikTok’s reach among young audiences underscores the importance of investigating its content to understand and intervene in extremists’ use of TikTok as a megaphone.

Guided by moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2007), we conducted a quantitative content analysis on a sample of politically extreme LW/RW TikTok videos to assess whether they contained behavioral calls to action, moral appeals, content intended to be political or humorous, and whether these content types were associated with greater audience engagement (i.e., video likes or shares). We adopted a list of RW-extremist TikTok accounts identified by O’Connor (2021) and snowball-sampled LW-extremist accounts advocating revolutionary LW movements (i.e., Communism, Marxism, Lenin). Randomly sampling up to 10 videos from each account resulted in a total of N=1,615 videos created by n=94 RW- and n=108 LW-extremist accounts (Mfollowers=23,539; SD=61,344; Median=1663). Intercoder reliability exceeded κ > .70 for all variables. Coding and data analysis are ongoing; expected completion is February 2023.

Authors

• Irina Andreeva, University at Buffalo

• Abigail Grey Reinbold, University at Buffalo

• Madeline Taggart, University at Buffalo

• Tahleen A Lattimer, University at Buffalo, SUNY

• Stephanie Gillis, University at Buffalo

• Alexandra Vuich, University at Buffalo

• Raphaela Velho, University at Buffalo

• Emily Lapan, University at Buffalo

• Lindsay Hahn, University at Buffalo