Mid Sweden University

TikTok is a newly established social media platform with a lot of active and young users. On the app all kinds of political and controversial subjects get discussed, but how these are received, shared and interacted with are not something that we know a lot about today. The purpose of the study is to see how the news of the american presidential election and the abortion debate are being framed on the social media platform TikTok, as well as seeing what types of subjects within these debates are getting the most attention.

This study did a quantitative content analysis, examining 600 analysis units. These have been divided into two TikToks hashtags, called #Abortionban and #Election2020. With 300 videos per hashtag, these have been further divided into popular videos versus unpopular videos – 150 per each.

The videos are mostly framed as negative or neutral for the most part on both the hashtags, but the abortionban hashtag is more critical and also more emotional than the Election2020 hashtag. As the Election2020 hashtag leaned in almost all instances towards being more neutral and emotional but not at all critical. Barely one third of the 300 videos in the Election2020 hashtag was critical, while the majority of the abortionban hashtag, marking 80 percent, was critical. This was the biggest difference between the two hashtags, as well as the Abortionban hashtag being much more emotional, but the difference there was not as noticable. The most prominent subjects discussed within the hashtags were the same both within the popular and the impopular videos, and had a lot in common. For example on the Abortionban hashtag the subjects prochoice and prolife were both very prominent in the popular and unpopular videos, as well as voting and humour for the Election2020 hashtag. Which shows that some subjects get discussed no matter the interaction they get from their audiences, and are often subjects that the general public has a lot of thoughts on, as well as for being discussed in other media.