Is TikTok Breaking Young Voters’ Brains?

The GREAT National Experiment on America’s Gen Z

Like most TikTok users, I don’t recall looking for anything particular when I opened the app while lying on the couch the previous evening.

However, I remember one video that dared me to examine my digital diet. “Check your TikTok screen time,” user @katherout challenged me. “Then check how many hours you spent last week with your friends. It should not be similar. You may spend more time with people you don’t know on TikTok than people you know in real life.”

And so I checked. At my peak, I was using TikTok for almost five hours a week. That same week, I spent around three hours with friends and family.

My experience is not unusual. For many Americans, TikTok has become one of the great time sucks of the era, a perpetual engagement machine with an algorithm that knows how to keep you glued.

That superpower, TikTok’s ability to keep us watching and watching and watching, is something that has experts, pundits, and politicians worried. Today, tens of millions of young people get their news from TikTok. What exactly are they seeing, and how does that affect their beliefs?

TikTok counts some 150 million Americans among its monthly users, many young people who spend hours a day scrolling.

Yet, because of the app’s rapid rise and relative newness, we know very little about how all that TikTok time is affecting its users’ politics and the politics of our country as a whole.

Is it driving further polarization and spreading more low-quality information? Is it driving nihilism and apathy? Or is all this an overblown moral panic, the product of older generations seeing something sinister about “kids these days?”

TikTok itself says it’s a boon to our politics. The company argues its platform is a vehicle for informing, entertaining, and building community. It says it tries to balance its users’ demand for debate and discussion with the goal of connecting people and “not caus[ing] division.”

“During elections, we focus on protecting the integrity of our platform to maintain a creative, safe, and positive place for people to enjoy a diverse range of content,” a friend at TikTok told me.

Much of the US government, however, sees it differently. Earlier in the year, President Biden signed legislation forcing ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the app by January 19, 2025 (with a possible 90-day extension) or shut it down. TikTok’s bipartisan critics mainly object to the app on national security grounds, fearing what a company cozy with the Chinese Communist Party would do with millions of Americans’ data.

But they have also raised concerns about its effects on our politics. “The thing I think is probably the biggest concern is that most people are getting their news from TikTok under the age of 30, and therefore, it could be an instrument of propaganda and disinformation moving forward. Those concerns are specific to TikTok,” now-former Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher told tech journalist Kara Swisher this past December.

Usually, when you’re caught between corporate spokespeople and politicians, some truth can be found in consulting the experts. But consulting the experts leads to uncertainty when it comes to TikTok and politics.

Studies have repeatedly suggested that using TikTok significantly impacts one’s political views. But when it comes to fears of the app contributing to a more polarized, less informed discourse among the nation’s youngest voters, there’s still too much we don’t know. The app and the lack of research are simply too young for researchers to draw conclusive answers.

We have unwittingly found ourselves amid a grand political experiment.

Not All Social Media Is The Same. TikTok Is A Different Beast.

TikTok's explosive growth and how quickly it happened separates it from other social media apps.

The app launched in 2017 and merged with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, but 2020 was the year it really took off. That year saw a pandemic-fueled surge from about 40 million monthly users at the start of the year to more than 100 million users by August.

Today, according to the most recent figures that TikTok has publicly shared, its user count is up to 150 million. Though Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook still boast more adult users, TikTok is closing the gap and growing swiftly. At the same time, its rivals’ growth is largely stagnant, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study of how quickly TikTok’s user base had grown.

People who use TikTok tend to use it a lot. The app is notorious for being addictive, especially for younger users. Researchers at Baylor University found that TikTok users, compared to other platforms, are prone to fall into addictive habits with the short-video TikTok style.

The Baylor researchers discovered that something like 24 percent of TikTok users in their study could be diagnosed as having an addiction to the app. Similarly, more than half of teens in Pew’s survey of teenage social media behavior say they use TikTok daily; 17 percent say they’re on it “almost constantly.”

In those endless scroll sessions, young people consume political content: About a third of adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok.

What Does TikTok’s Political Content Look Like?

TikTok isn’t the first platform to host an influx of political commentary (as anyone who’s had their YouTube or Twitter recommendations flooded with Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro takes can attest).

So what’s different about politics on TikTok?

The answer lies in the short-form video nature of its content on the platform and the powerful, mysterious algorithm that delivers those videos in a fine-tuned way that keeps users hooked and emotionally invested.

The content on the app is highly emotional and vibes-based. It is usually presented through another average person sharing their experiences, not usually from professional news accounts or reliable sources.

“Much of the political expression on TikTok is humoristic or cynical, colorful, often over-the-top, and infused with popular culture references. It is deeply emotional, ranging from roaring laughter to rolling tears,” researchers Ioana Literat and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik wrote in a 2023 paper on TikTok and youthful political expression.

“It is often profoundly personal, framing political issues through young people’s personal experience and worldviews,” the pair write. “In other words, it is anything but serious, detached, and rational. However, that does not make it any less meaningful.”

Quick rants and bursts of commentary from a person looking at you through your phone make analysis and discussions feel genuine, intimate, and real, even if the content of what they are saying is misleading or not entirely factual.

And the platform’s design makes political spaces different from the algorithm or feeds of other social media.

Much of the engagement on the app happens on the individualized “For You” page, a hub for videos the algorithm suggests for a user. Once you engage with a video, the “For You” page algorithm responds by showing you similar content from like-minded individuals or accounts. The app keeps tracking your interactions to see what gets you engaged or staying on the platform. These kinds of videos draw more engagement through comments and “stitches” (the app function that lets a user include a snippet of an original video and add commentary on top to make their own clip), drawing even more emotional reactions and adding to the sense that other people are feeling exactly the way you are.

Facebook’s comments section elicited the same kind of responses and debates; some viral Twitter takes still do, though you generally choose to participate in those conversations. Meanwhile, TikTok’s political and social discourse can feel secluded and totalizing at once. That creates an echo chamber: a sense of shared community or identity dealing with the same frustrations or worries you might have and insulating you from views outside that sphere.

The Case For TikTok

Being a young, politically aware TikTok user might feel like a losing battle. After all, the age-old gripe of older generations is that the youth are checked out of politics, uninterested, and insufficiently engaged. Then, when they take to TikTok and create a political discourse of their own, the critics’ answer is, essentially, “But not like that!”

Some researchers point to the broad positives of an app that brings political content to users who might not otherwise get involved.

The key is to think differently about political expression and activity when examining TikTok's culture.

Political expression should be serious and based on facts and rationality, but when we look at TikTok's political content, it feels the opposite of that. It’s silly and humorous, sometimes nonsensical but really personal, and filtered through young people’s lived experiences.

TikTok offers young people a sandbox to test out what it means to be good citizens while discovering and honing their political identity and political speech.

They also offer a challenge to outside observers: Just because political speech looks different from the discourse that came before it doesn’t mean it’s an outright cause for concern. This kind of political expression may be the starting point for additional political self-discovery and for feeling less removed from the political process.

Even researchers critical of TikTok’s impact on political discourse acknowledge some upsides. For example, researchers Richard Fox and Kiana Karimi at Loyola Marymount University have raised concerns about the app. Still, their research found that young TikTok users are more likely than users of other platforms to engage in online political acts, like sharing political posts and following a politician’s account. Those political acts aren’t just online activity either: The researchers found that young users are also more likely to make donations to a political or ideological cause and say they would volunteer for a campaign.

The Case For Concern

Still, “participation” in politics is not the sole metric for a healthy civic body. Just as apathy endangers democracy, so do rival camps of hyper-partisans whose media diet near-exclusively confirms their preexisting biases.

Early research suggests that TikTok may fuel that type of polarization, feeding each user their self-affirmation chamber.

“TikTok is … likely part of a new echo chamber as the algorithms being applied deliver ideologically compatible content to TikTok users,” Fox and Karimi write in a 2023 study published in the Journal of Social Media in Society.

“It feels pretty dire to me when you think about how partisan we are, that if you’re only exposed to one thing, or mostly one thing, you don’t sort of assess or think of other views,” Fox explains. “I would say TikTok possibly contributes to young people … being sort of aware of and activated on a smaller subset of cultural issues. And it … detracts from any notion of a well-balanced set of news stories.”

Intuitively, that makes sense, as an algorithm adept at delivering personally pleasing content to users seems primed to reinforce one’s existing political beliefs. I saw this for myself when I created two new TikTok accounts: For one account, my first searches were “Donald Trump” and “Trump trial.” For the other, I searched “Joe Biden” and “Gaza.”

Within a few scrolling sessions, the “Trump” account was getting non-stop anti-immigrant content. The Biden account quickly morphed in the opposite ideological direction: Viral funny videos began to turn into updates from Gaza, takes about college Palestine protests like at Columbia University, videos critical of Biden’s mental competency, and angry responses about the potential for a TikTok ban.

It’s not so clear, however, that TikTok uniformly moves people to the extremes. In a 2022 University of Oregon study, the vast majority of TikTok users reported that their ideology shifted after using the app, and most said it had shifted “a great deal” or “a lot” during their use.

However, the study’s author, Lauren Church, wrote that there was “no clear pattern between party affiliation and direction of ideological change along the political spectrum.” And while half of the sample’s registered Democrats indicated they’d become more liberal during their TikTok use, a full 40 percent said they’d grown more conservative. Similarly, among Republicans, 57 percent reported getting more conservative, while 40 percent said they’d become more liberal.

Still, while research into TikTok’s effects on political polarization or shifts in young peoples’ ideology is relatively new, plenty of journalistic and academic work has tracked another TikTok challenge to democracy and American politics: the classic threat of misinformation.

Though not exclusive to TikTok, misleading or false narratives can spread on the app because of its users' highly subjective, emotional, and often humorous speech. TikTok has not been spared from examinations into how it can be a vehicle for misinformation and how it can try to stop the spread.

For its part, TikTok argues that it has taken steps to prevent echo chambers from forming on the app and proactively tries to stop too much similar content from inundating the average feed. “TikTok’s “For You” feed enables people to discover a variety of ideas and topics by design, as it recommends a range of diverse content and proactively interrupts repetitive patterns. The company points to the safeguards it has implemented to avoid the spread of health or election misinformation and to fact-check or review the spread of manipulated media, conspiracy theories, or posts about emergency events.

Whether TikTok’s safeguards or moderation tactics are making a difference remains to be seen. Even the best research on the subject relies on a relatively short time frame. With more time to study it, we’ll have a better idea of what TikTok is doing to our politics.

But life won’t wait for those conclusions. Even if the TikTok ban ultimately dooms the app, it won’t be for at least seven months. Meaning it will remain in full swing throughout the 2024 election.

In short, the grand national experiment will continue.