Thirst Traps and Quick Cuts: The Effects of TikTok “Edits” on Evaluations of Politicians

IF 5.5 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2025-04-12 DOI:10.1177/20563051251329990

Kevin Munger, Valerie Li

引用次数: 0

Abstract

TikTok and the associated technologies for recording and editing short-form video constitute a large and growing portion of online communication. Previous modalities of social media, including static images and especially text, engendered significant attention to the facticity of the communication: was a statement true or false? Did an event actually take place? For a certain genre of stylized, highly edited short-form video, this is beside the point—which is to produce a compelling video that portrays a prominent figure in a particular light. We conduct an experiment to evaluate whether “edits” of prominent politicians can change voter perceptions. We find that “thirst trap” edits cause an increase in perceptions of politician attractiveness and that “badass” edits improve overall evaluations of Donald Trump (but not Joe Biden). Descriptively, we present a distribution of the evaluations of the attractiveness of Trump, Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr (“RFK”), demonstrating significant variation.

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口渴陷阱与快速剪辑：TikTok "编辑 "对政治家评价的影响

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来源期刊

Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

9.20

自引率

3.80%

发文量

111

审稿时长

12 weeks

期刊介绍： Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.