Political polarization and politainment: Methodology for analyzing crypto hate speech on TikTok

TikTok has become an international benchmark: In 2022 it was the most downloaded application in all of Europe. Political discourse has not stayed on the sidelines, and its rhetoric has been adapted to a young electorate who feels at home with this new platform. Given this social network’s explosion, the main objective of this research is to analyze which topics and approaches the parties with the greatest parliamentary representation use most frequently by looking at their activity on TikTok and determine how they have leveraged a time of polarization and political confrontation to a network geared toward entertainment. To achieve these objectives, a methodological triangulation based on three analyses –quantitative content, discourse, and qualitative content– is used. The sample consists of 250 posts from the official profiles of the following Spanish political parties: Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), Partido Popular (PP), Ciudadanos (C’s), Unidas Podemos (UP), and Vox. Specifically, a non-random stratification system was used, selecting the 50 videos from each party that had with the highest number of views since they launched their profiles on this social network. From a theoretical standpoint, this study proposes a new concept, the aggressive critical message (ACM), which is presented as a further contribution to the conceptual framework of emerging studies on crypto hate speech. From an empirical standpoint, the results obtained reveal that the partisan rhetoric on TikTok is not homogeneous, and substantial differences are seen between the topics addressed by the different parties. It also is concluded that the parties are implementing techniques used in entertainment alongside polarization itself, which trivializes politics, aiming to go viral rather than to provoke thought.