The morning session of Day Two at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts for me with a presentation by Gil Sharon, on the MAGA movement’s presence on TikTok. The 2024 US election was the first election where TikTok played a significant role, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement used the platform extensively for its campaigning.
Charlie Kirk was one of the most significant MAGA figures on TikTok, and believed that there was something about the platform that particularly managed to reach potential Trump supporters. This also involved a substantial collaborative effort; it engaged not only in top-down messaging, but in a symbiosis between this and bottom-up participation, message creation, and amplification.
But to analyse these processes is methodologically difficult. TikTok does not offer many formal community-building features, which makes it more complicated to trace such connectivity and collectivity; hashtags are not systematically used, and there is only limited direct interaction, and even the videos themselves are often ephemeral and will disappear from the platform soon after posting.
This requires novel approaches, which draw on issue mapping methods, employ a digital ethnographic approach, and build strongly on the qualitative manual coding of videos in order to trace personal and institutional connections between actors. This also includes attention to the personal testimonies included in the videos.
A network analysis of these coded data, focussing on shared issues between actors, shows that leading actors in the network are the major pundits (Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson), but that more generic TikTok users are crucial to connecting them.
Attention to issues is variously distributed between Trump’s own TikTok content, the pundits, and the ordinary users; these emphasise different aspects, and through this connectively construct Trump’s image in an apparently organic way – but in doing so also validate the candidate, and each other, while attacking and trolling their political opponents.
This means that successful image construction for the candidate Trump is the result of networked action between different actors. It harnesses the vernacular of TikTok as a platform.
