Project date: 7 May 2025
Link: https://rootcause.global/making-tiktok-tick/
This report by Rootcause and Campaign Lab explores over 13,000 videos posted since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister (October 2022), and provides valuable insights for campaigners, politicians, media analysts, and progressive organisations.
Methodology Summary:
This study used a hashtag-based sampling method to identify politically relevant TikTok videos from the UK, focusing on mainstream political discourse and avoiding extreme or fringe content. Videos were classified by narrative angle (e.g. criticism, satire, factual) and issue (e.g. cost of living, immigration, public finances) using a large language model (LLM)-powered classification framework.
Key methodological strengths include:
- Use of AI to ensure consistent, scalable content labelling
- Emphasis on median performance of videos, not just viral outliers
- Robust statistical analysis, including bootstrapping and Mann-Whitney U tests
Key Findings:
- Scale of Analysis: The research examined over 13,000 TikTok videos tagged with mainstream UK political hashtags. Collectively, these videos received more than 761 million views and were shared over 3.15 million times across platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook – 712,000 shares via WhatsApp alone. On average, each political TikTok video in the sample was shared seven times, indicating significant cross-platform influence beyond TikTok itself.
- Content Types (Narrative Angles): A large proportion of the videos (57%) focused on critical content, such as attacking politicians or policies. However, these accounted for just 45% of total plays, suggesting criticism doesn’t always lead to wide reach. In contrast, factual and informative videos, though only making up 5% of the total content, attracted 11.5% of all views, performing exceptionally well on a per-video basis. Meanwhile, content that promoted political parties or individual politicians consistently underperformed in both reach and engagement. The analysis revealed that the most common narrative style in UK political TikToks is criticism of politician conduct, making up 30% of all videos. In contrast, factual and informative content represents just 5% of the sample, yet punches far above its weight in terms of impact and reach. When looking at typical video performance by narrative type, factual and informative videos averaged around 25,000 plays each, significantly outperforming other categories. Videos that criticise specific policies had a median of about 7,400 plays, while those focused on criticising political parties lagged behind, with a typical reach of just 1,700 plays per video.
Contact: douglas@campaignlab.uk