Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Supply Side of Social Video
Open accessAbstract
TikTok has rapidly developed from a punchline for jokes about “kids these days” into a formidable force in American politics. The speed of this development is unprecedented, even in the rapidly-changing world of digital politics. Through a combination of hashtag and snowball sampling, we identify 11,546 TikTok accounts who primarily post about politics, allowing us to analyze trends in the posting, viewing and commenting behavior on 1,998,642 tiktoks they have uploaded. We test a number of theories about how the unique combination of affordances on TikTok shapes how it is used for political communication. Compared to the dominant platform for political videos (YouTube) we find that a higher percentage of TikTok users upload videos, TikTok view counts are more dominated by virality, and viewership of videos are less dependent on a given accounts’ number of followers/subscribers. We discuss how these findings affect the production of content that ultimately determines the experience of TikTok consumers.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Findings from TikTok and YouTube indicate that the top 20% of an account's videos receive more than 70% of the views.
“The parameters of the exponential decay function are informed by findings from studies on platforms like TikTok and YouTube [17], which indicate that the top 20% of an account's videos receive more than 70% of the views.”
From Auditing Political Exposure Bias: Algorithmic Amplification on Twitter/X During the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election (2025) · cites this paper as [17]
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Cheng, Z., & Li, Y. (2024) · Social Science Computer Review · doi:10.1177/08944393231178603 · Cited by 131 · see citing works
“Besides, TikTok has interactive features or affordances that successfully encourage viewers to participate in video creation (Guinaudeau et al., 2022).”
BackgroundYe, J., Luceri, L., & Ferrara, E. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3715275.3732159 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
“The parameters of the exponential decay function are informed by findings from studies on platforms like TikTok and YouTube [17], which indicate that the top 20% of an account’s videos receive more than 70% of the views.”
- Authors
- Guinaudeau, B., Munger, K., & Votta, F.
- Affiliations
- University of Konstanz (DE)
- Pennsylvania State University (US)
- University of Amsterdam (NL)
- Venue
- Computational Communication Research
- Publisher
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published
- 2022-10-01
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 463-485
- ISSN
- 2665-9085 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4297534160
- Cited by
- 77
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 10
- FWCI
- 23.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Computational Communication Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- HOPE (Hauptbibliothek Open Publishing Environment) (University of Zurich) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- TikTok, political communication, social video, video virality, user engagement, follower influence, platform affordances, internet and politics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
