Politicians keep courting the TikTok vote. Users aren’t impressed

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WashingtonCNN — TikTok may not be as hot a place for politics as many seem to think.

The attention devoted to TikTok as a powerful force in US politics — for better or for worse — does not seem to match up with the experience of most TikTok users, according to new survey data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

As the short-form video app has surged to 170 million US users, politicians have flocked to TikTok in hopes of wooing young voters. Former President Donald Trump joined TikTok last week, amassing 6 million followers in a matter of days. President Joe Biden’s campaign launched on TikTok in February and has posted more than 200 videos — though the campaign’s following is just a fraction of Trump’s at 373,000.

Other politicians, meanwhile, warn that TikTok’s links to China through its parent company mean the Chinese government could theoretically try to influence US politics on a massive scale, if it ever accessed the personal data of TikTok users. (TikTok denies it has ever given the Chinese government US user data and is suing to block a law Biden signed this spring that could ban the app from the United States.)

But the picture painted by Pew’s latest surveys suggests politics is still just a small part of what the platform has to offer. Many TikTok users in the survey said they care far more about entertainment, culture and friends. They don’t care as much about — or may not even want — political content in their feeds, according to the survey, a finding that’s consistent with users of Facebook and Instagram (but not on X, formerly Twitter, where news and politics have historically dominated).

Pew said its research involved 10,287 adult internet users in the United States who were surveyed from March 18 to March 24. The results were weighted “to be representative of all US adults by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories,” Pew added.

The research casts a slightly different light on TikTok and other social media platforms widely described as the new town square — where politicians and politically engaged Americans go to engage in cultural debate, score political points and supposedly influence the rest of the electorate.

In fact, the vast majority of the US TikTok users surveyed didn’t cite politics as a major or even minor reason for using the app, and just 12% reported posting any political content at all.