ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL: NEWS INFLUENCERS AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT IN LOCAL AND STATE POLITICS DISCOURSE DYNAMICS ON TIKTOK

Resumen

TikTok has rapidly established itself as a fixture for debate on the state of the web and society at large. The platform serves as a primary generator of trends and viral content, and as a locus for political concerns around globalisation, surveillance and privacy. What is considerably understudied is how TikTok is forging connections in political discourses more locally. We present an exploration of political discourses on TikTok through the case study of local city council elections, and later state elections, for Brisbane in the state of Queensland, Australia. Video metadata was recorded using the Zeeschuimer (Peeters, 2023) tool. We focus on the discursive dynamics of the broader local community both separately and in response to the communication of candidates. We draw on research on the social news landscape and the role of ‘newsfluencers’ and community narratives amidst changing audience expectations (Hurcombe, 2022), and clustering of cross-ideological ties in social media news sharing over time (Angus et al, 2023). Through this, we contrast the topic-selective engagement across various actors, from mainstream and national news outlets, local or alternative media, businesses, organisations, political campaigners, and unaffiliated individual users. As such, we focus on how local TikTok users respond to, remix, engage with, and disseminate political communication on TikTok, as well as how they create their own political content, such as advocating for/against a candidate, an issue, or engaging in commentary on the wider election process.