(Paris) Popular with young people, the TikTok application has become an essential communication tool for political figures, raising questions about its role and influence in the recent results of the European elections.
“I had underestimated the strength of TikTok,” declared in France the head of the Ecologist list Marie Toussaint after the results of the European elections on Sunday, seeming to implicitly target the campaign led by Jordan Bardella and the RN on the social network belonging to the Chinese company ByteDance.
With a record score of 31.37%, the far-right National Rally (RN) party was able to count on its head of list with some 1.5 million subscribers to build “notoriety capital […] among young people”, analyzes Romain Fargier, doctor and researcher at the Center for Political and Social Studies (CEPEL) at the University of Montpellier.
Thanks to his numerous videos of campaign moments, “punchlines” on television sets or even carefully selected extracts from speeches, the president of the RN Jordan Bardella has become the third most followed French political figure on TikTok, after the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron with 4.5 million subscribers and the leader of the La France Insoumise party (LFI, radical left), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has 2.4 million.
“There is no study which proves that there is a direct correlation between an electoral result and success on social networks”, tempers Romain Fargier.
Nevertheless, “the trend towards politicization of content on TikTok has played a certain role on the media and media-political agenda […] and Jordan Bardella is building a base of notoriety among future first-time voters, this is the main interest of its strategy on TikTok”, says the expert.
The messages condensed by the TikTok format “can lead to an excessive simplification of political issues, with a view to a public which is perhaps less informed or less politically literate”, underlines Refka Payssan, teacher at the University of Paris Saclay expert in information and communication technologies in the digital age.
Romain Fargier also notes the use of sarcasm, irony and humorous memes by the far right, which creates “very stereotypical political communications”, often based “on emotions and pathos”.
A strategy from the United States, where TikTok has 170 million users. The American far right, “the ‘alt-right’ has played a major role in producing pro-Trump content and memes on the internet, like Pepe the Frog”, a frog who appeared in a strip drawn from the 2000s, he describes.
Since then, TikTok seems to have benefited many European far-right parties. This is by far the political group posting the most on the social network, but also which has the greatest number of “likes” in relation to the number of videos posted, according to a study published by the Politico site in March.
“It’s something that we see in Germany with Maximilian Krah (formerly head of the list of the German far-right party AfD, Editor’s note) […] he uses his account to transmit a message”, taking inspiration from meme codes, says Dr. Katja Muñoz, who studies the connection between social media and politics.
“So young voters can identify with it and they find it “cool” and funny. They may not always agree, but after a while you get used to this rhetoric,” she adds.
TikTok users are also faced with an algorithm which “tends to lock itself into ideological bubbles more than other networks”, believes Romain Fargier.
“If you receive notifications every day that talk about Bardella, after a while we enter a vicious circle. The algorithm bludgeons with this kind of information, until it directs your opinion towards the fact that this person is the most reliable,” according to Refka Payssan.
For Véronique Reille-Soult, president of Backbone Consulting, a crisis management firm and expert in opinion analysis, the phenomenon extends beyond a simple “successful campaign on TikTok”.
The network “and its algorithm make you see information that is not the reality of what you experience on a daily basis. […] You see images and information […] that make you fantasize about a reality of something that is far from you. […] This has created a climate among some young people, a kind of stronger tension.”
