TikTok and the new language of political communication

Abstract

Introduction: Political parties struggle to reconnect to Young people by using social networks. Acknowledging that 2020 has been the year of TikTok, most Spanish political parties have joined this social network: Podemos, with 191.400 followers and 3.1 million likes, is the most followed political party on this platform. Method: Using multimodal content analysis, this paper aims at analyzing how the party is using this social network, and for which purposes, placing the attention on how Podemos has adapted to TikTok specificities in terms of both language and technical affordances. Results: Results show that while the party perfectly adapts to TikTok’s specific language and technical affordances (special effects, etc.), instead of focusing on entertainment, the platform’s main genre, it uses TikTok as a showcase for political activities, failing in favoring a renovating relationship with users. However, politics is represented through the “game frame”, that is to say, dramatized as a battlefield between Good and Evil, which strengthens the populist dichotomous vision of the world, endorsing emotional response. Conclusion: In this sense, it is possible to conclude that, although Podemos mainly displays political content, this content falls into the category of politainment. Considering that present trends in usage rates suggest that the short-video format is the future of social media, we might expect an increase in politainmement content.