Political Uses of TikTok during the 2022 Swedish Election

The second presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Andreas Widholm, whose interest is in the use of TikTok by right-wing users in Sweden. There has been substantial coverage of a scandal in Sweden during the recent EU elections that centred on the communication strategies of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ troll factory on social media, and while this was uncovered after the present study concluded, the concerns about a right-wing wave on TikTok already existed and motivated this work.

Indeed, engagement with the Sweden Democrats’ social media activities is substantial; their accounts reach a large and especially young audience, and this includes incessant attacks on mainstream journalism and journalists in Sweden. TikTok is a key tool in this, but political and other actors also need to adapt to this platform’s specific practices and affordances.

This particularly incudes the need to present and position accounts as influencers, and engage in the platform’s imitative remixing practices. The present study examined the types of political actors which used TikTok during the early stages of the 2022 national election campaign in Sweden, and explored actor types, criticism and praise towards parties, and the utilisation of platform features in communication.

Most accounts (71%) observed were private and unknown, and this may include inauthentic influence operation accounts; 13% belonged to party youth organisations, 9% to parties themselves, and 4% to individual politicians; legacy media were essentially absent. 60% of videos containing criticism targetted the Social Democrats; 11% the Sweden Democrats. 26% praised the Sweden Democrats, while 24% praised the Moderates and 12% the Liberals (which formed the current right-wing government after the election).

Follower count (obviously), speech, text, symbols, and emoticons produced greater engagement; use of music and video editing, interestingly for this platform, did not. Right-wing praise also generated engagement, while criticisms did not.

Overall, this supports the perception of a strong right-wing presence on the platform, but not its understanding as a largely music-based space. Whether the influence operations of the Sweden Democrat troll farm also affected these results remains unknown, and needs to be explored in more detail still.