The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Lion Wedel, which also focusses on the role of TikTok during the 2025 German election. The project here was conducted in collaboration with several public service and commercial media organisations in Germany, and sought to examine what political content TikTok users in Germany actually encountered during the election campaign.
This relied crucially on data donations from TikTok users: it asked these users to download their TikTok data packages and donate these to the research project for aggregate analysis. Such projects often struggle with high drop-out rates; instead of paying a panel company for access to users, this project recruited via media exposure, and also incentivised participants by providing rapid feedback on their own media exposure experience (somewhat modelled on the annual Spotify Wrapped and other platform experience reports provided to users).
From one week before to two weeks after the election, 981 completed donations was received, and 688 of these contained a watch history; apparently TikTok changed the data download package structure during the timeframe of the study, which reduced the number of usable data packages. The participant base is fairly skewed to the left of German politics, and covers data on some 2.8 million videos encountered.
The study labelled official party content as well as party-referencing content within this dataset; further labels will be added at a later stage. One average, 5% of all videos are political in some way; the majority of these are party-referencing, with official accounts, news, and influencer accounts contributing a smaller number of videos.
The watch, like, and share counts for official party content follow the distribution of voting intentions within the participant base; this changes for party-referencing content, where the far-right AfD party was considerably more prominent. The amount of political content in feeds surges considerably after the right-wing CDU accepted votes from the far-right AfD in a parliamentary vote; this is especially pronounced for left-wing party content.
Voters for specific parties often encounter content mostly from their own parties, but on the left of politics the Left Party tends to outperform the SPD or Greens parties, and on the right AfD content often dominates over CDU/CSU content.
