You thought you could get away from questionable and tiresome political rants by muting your cousin on Facebook and sticking to TikTok, eh? Not so fast.
What happened: TikTok posts about Canada’s election — many of which are published by accounts outside the country — are racking up millions of views on the platform, according to a new report.
- The analysis by Reset Tech, a research group focused on the impact of tech on democracy, found that posts about Canadian politics generated around 2 billion views this year, with 45% of those posts created by accounts outside Canada.
Why it matters: TikTok is quietly becoming an important source of news for Canadians, an evolution that has raised concerns about the growing influence of a China-based tech platform on Canada’s democracy.
- Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, has denied that the Chinese government influences content served to users in Western markets, and says it has taken steps to make it easier to identify misleading content.
Why it’s happening: TikTok’s growth has been explosive, and Meta’s blackout of news in Canada on Instagram and Facebook cleared the field for TikTok to own more of the online conversation about politics.
What’s next: Anywhere people spend lots of time on the internet tends to turn into a forum for political news debate. If people continue to spend more of their waking hours scrolling TikTok, expect more political discourse to happen on the platform.—TS