TikTok in Political Campaigns: A Case Study of Colombia’s 2023 Regional Elections

Abstract

The use of TikTok in political campaigns has become a global and local trend because it makes it cheaper to finance candidates and allows the exploration of multimedia formats. The article intends to analyze the use of this social media platform in the regional elections of Colombia during 2023, hypothesizing that regardless of the geographical context, it influenced the election of the winning candidates and strengthened the theoretical position of the interface laws. The methodology takes as a corpus the number of followers and TikTok videos made by the two candidates with the highest number of votes in each of Colombia’s 32 departments and capitals. The method integrates two strategies: a descriptive analysis of social media that evidences the cases in which the winning candidate had more followers or communicative pieces on TikTok and a canonical correlation analysis that establishes the relationship between the use of the platform and the country’s geographical areas. The discussion suggests that TikTok has become a fundamental tool for political campaigns that transcend territory and that this trend will continue to rise due to the uniqueness of its algorithm and the diversity of offers for user interaction. The article contributes to the literature on electoral campaigns, TikTok interface, and influence in territorial contexts. Finally, we propose a research agenda that delves into the transformations of this phenomenon for pop-political culture and social emotions.