Diverse Approaches in the TikTok Campaigning by Bavarian Political Parties

The next presentation in this AoIR 2024 conference session is by Constantin Paschertz and Christian Schneider, whose focus is on populist German politics on TikTok in the Bavarian state election in 2023. The use of social media in political campaigning is not new, of course, but German parties have tended to be hesitant to use TikTok for this – out of concerns about the Chinese ownership and dubious data practices of the platform.

But some 15% of German online users now also use TikTok for news (and this particularly includes first-time voters), and especially the fascist AfD party has moved to embraced TikTok quite strongly for political campaigning by now. What campaign strategies are German parties using here, then? This can be understood through the lens of what affordances are employed, and how emotionalisation, personalisation, exemplification, negative campaigning, and entertainisation strategies form part of the process. Further, how do such strategies relate to the plays, shares, comments, and likes that TikTop videos receive?

The project gathered some 442 videos from 12 TikTok accounts during the election campaign, and coded these for their content features. Activity patterns do not match the eventual results of the election: the AfD is most active by far, while Greens and CSU were the next most active parties. The SPD did not use TikTok at all. The CSU received nearly one million more plays than the AfD, though, and the Greens received only a fraction of plays compared to the CSU, even in spite of their comparable number of videos.

Negative campaigning and professional personalisation seem to produce a greater amount of engagement; the fringe parties AfD and Linke were most active in negative campaigning. FDP and Linke used typical TikTok design elements most often, but overall their use was quite low. Emotionalisation and entertainisation did not have any significant effects on user attention. Most TikTok videos simply used conventional political content, e.g. parliamentary and campaign speeches by politicians.