The use and impact of TikTok in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election

Abstract

The use of social media (SM) platforms in contemporary politics and democracies has been well researched, most particularly the use of Twitter. However, the social media scenario is constantly changing and new platforms frequently appear. This is the case of TikTok, launched in 2016, and already the sixth most popular platform worldwide, and the fourth most used in Brazil. Thus, due to its popularization and the fact that politicians and election candidates have begun to use it, there is a strong need to understand its use and impacts. Within this context, the present study aims to analyze how the main candidates running in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election used their official profiles, how citizens engaged with the candidates’ posts, and the possible correlations between a candidate’s performance and the votes received. For this, we collected and analyzed all the posts shared by candidates between June and October 30, 2022, the day of the second round. As a result, 576 posts and more than 540 million interactions were analyzed, and our findings show that: (i) candidates used TikTok in a similar manner to how they used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in the 2018 elections; (ii) strong differences were observed regarding the quality and content of posts made by the observed candidates; (iii) despite having fewer followers, the elected president received 55% of the total interactions; and (iv) for the first round, the share of the number of likes received by the elected candidate was exactly the vote share received in the elections, although this was not repeated in the second round. Due to the recency of this platform and the lack of a broadly open official API for collecting data from this, we believe that this is one of the first studies regarding the analysis of all posts made on TikTok by candidates in a Brazilian presidential election.