The next session at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online election debates, and starts with the great Felix Victor Münch, focussing on the 2025 German federal election. His focus here is especially on the role of TikTok during that election – how is this affecting electoral campaigning and public debate? TikTok itself has recently acted against some problematic practices during a range of elections, in fact.
There is some correlation, in fact, between TikTok engagement with Left Party posts and voting intention for the party over the final stages of the election campaign, but such patterns should not be studied in isolation; the ultimate aim with social media analysis should usually be a cross-platform perspective. This enables the comparison of content prevalence across multiple platforms, for instance, and the study of information flows between these spaces.
The present study scraped subtitles of talkshows from public service broadcast outlets, and segmented these into 4-5-sentence segments; it also captured TikTok videos from key public and political figures, and again segmented their content into short segment; it then filtered out non-political content; and finally compared the semantic similarity between talkshow and TikTok segments to identify close correspondence.
Key topics were citizen benefits and migration; climate change was a much less prominent topic. This could then also be broken down by party, and the far-right AfD party as well as the conservative parties were most actively speaking about migration, while the Greens were the only party to substantially thematise climate change. This was also unevenly distributed across different talkshows, in fact.
The data can also be visualised as a network, by examining the similarities between the different speech segments; this helps identify the most influential posts within the dataset, essentially identifying speech segments that went viral and influenced subsequent contributions. There are also triangles of resonance between specific talkshows, party representatives, and journalists. This is somewhat gendered as well; the one male talkshow host resonates a great deal more with the AfD. This varies by topic as well, though.
Overall, this points to a disturbing resonance for the migration topic, and a lack of focus on climate change, as well as considerable closeness between some talkshow hosts and specific parties. There are also some problems still, and in fact the audio translation tool Whisper sometimes hallucinates text within the audio.
