Using TikTok could be making you more politically polarised: Study

People on TikTok tend to follow accounts that align with their own political beliefs, meaning the platform is creating political echo chambers among its users.

These findings, from a study my collaborators, Yanlin Li and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, and I published in the academic journal New Media & Society, show that people mostly hear from voices they already agree with.

We analysed the structure of different political networks on TikTok and found that right-leaning communities are more isolated from other political groups and from mainstream news outlets. Looking at their internal structures, the right-leaning communities are more tightly connected than their left-leaning counterparts.