Populism From Below : Mapping User-Centered Populist Content on TikTok

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores an understudied area in political communication research by examining populist communication on the social media platform TikTok. Specifically, the study focuses on content related to the Sweden Democrat party during the 2022 election. This thesis also proposes an integrated methodological and quantitative empirical framework for analyzing the multi-dimensional relationships present in political communication on digital social media. By identifying key hashtags used by followers of the party during the time of the 2022 election, including the campaigning leading up to it and the government formation following the election, new empirical data consisting of 250 TikTok videos and their accompanying information was collected. Firstly, the data was used to map SD tagged content on TikTok. Secondly, while difficult to measure, a framework was created to code and operationalize populist characteristics within the TikTok posts. Through quantitative content analysis and linear regression, the study examines the relationship between TikTok affordances and populist communication. Affordances are used to describe what an object, or in this case, a technology, can be used for and let a user do. Finally, the data collected was used to determine potential relationships supporting that populist style communication is favored by social media affordances. The results show that videos on the topic of immigration and videos from accounts with many followers were significantly related to virality. However, limitations in studying content on TikTok, due to the platform’s API were highlighted, as well as the difficulty of handling and coding video data from the platform. Overall, this study contributes to the field of political communication by demonstrating the multi-faceted relationship between media logic, social media affordances, and populist communication.