Social Media and Democracy: Can TikTok Teach Us Politics?

By Quinn Parselle, Work Experience Student at Unlock Democracy. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Unlock Democracy.

Social media is taking over every aspect of our lives. In 2024, 53.3 million UK adults aged 16 and over - 82% of the adult population - reported using a social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or X (formerly known as Twitter) (Office for National Statistics, 2024) (source)

This inclusion of social media into our everyday lives does not fall short of politics. 58% of those aged under 35 primarily use social media to access political news (source), and in response the dangers of using social media to access politics are widely known.

As social media is so widely accessible, anyone can put anything on the internet. This results in the frequent posting of misinformation, known as ‘fake’ news, likely to gain engagement and to make a profit from that engagement. This misinformation and sensationalism is easily spread online (98% of social media users report encountering misinformation in their feeds (source) and can be easily accepted for the truth. This can lead to a misinformed public, which diminishes the effectiveness of social media as a political tool.

This problem can be heightened by our social media “echo chambers”, as we are more likely to accept news stories as truth if they align with our own political opinions. Social media algorithms are designed to keep you engaged with the content being pushed to you, so it learns what kinds of posts you interact with and keep your attention. This means that social media begins to only push political content that you agree with (as you are more likely to interact with it), which can create an “echo chamber” where a person, or group of people, only sees one political view, which decreases political education on political views and ideologies. 

Because of this attention-focused algorithm, social media is also more likely to push sensationalist, polarising political content as they receive more “clicks” and more engagement. This can increase the spread of extreme political ideologies in ways that traditional media cannot, which makes social media much more dangerous for spreading extremism.

But if social media is so bad for accessing politics, why do people still use it? And how does social media perform in comparison to other political platforms?

Whether social media is an “echo chamber” is widely debated. Social media allows for more people to express political opinions, as the average person is able to contribute through comments, posts or even just likes and shares. Some argue that this means that social media can increase the speed of the spread of information that can challenge some dominant traditional news sources, such as newspapers. For example, Twitter in recent years has become central to the unfolding of news stories in real time, as some journalists seem to prefer this reporting style of instant communication. This allows for political discussion to become not just a reaction to the story, but part of the reporting itself, which increases political participation.

Furthermore, when comparing social media to traditional media, one type of journalism stands out - newspapers. Newspapers are just as well-known as social media for being biased and misleading: right-leaning newspapers include The Sun, and The Telegraph, and left-leaning newspapers include The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, which are all read by hundreds of thousands of people around the UK. That is not to disregard the journalistic standards that newspapers mostly adhere to (such as limits on what they can publish in terms of accuracy and libel considerations, and a general expectation of publishing “true and accurate” information), and that social media does not have .

Despite these newspapers sometimes publishing biased, sensational or sometimes even fake news, they do not seem to be seen as nearly as unreliable by their readers as social media. Only 14% of those who primarily read newspapers as their source of political news regard them as unreliable (source). It could be argued that this view of newspapers as being reliable, despite often not being this way in reality, could have an even more detrimental impact on democracy and on political education than social media. Users of social media are generally aware of its unreliability and know to check with outside sources about the information they receive (54% say they "often" try to verify political news they find online by using other sources (source), such as BBC reporting or TV and broadcast media), while they likely will not do the same with newspapers.

Overall, while there do need to be extensive improvements to the way politics is discussed and circulated on social media, dismissing it entirely may do more damage than good. The fact is that social media has made politics more accessible than ever, and most of the population are aware of its unreliability and take steps to mitigate the effects of this. Social media is also not the only platform that struggles with misinformation, and therefore should not be completely written off because of it. 

Rather than denigrating and shaming those who use social media to gain political education or stopping political discussion on social media altogether, we need to improve the platforms that allow and profit from the negative reporting of politics on social media. This could be done by legislating to create journalistic standards for social media, such as making social media platforms consciously push political views to a wider range of people and forcing the platforms to put more time and money into taking down posts and accounts spreading extremist ideologies or misinformation, regardless of the engagement - and therefore revenues - they generate for the tech giants.

Social media companies often liken their products to the public square. In some ways they’re right. But no functioning public square tolerates incitements to violence, just as no serious model of free speech amounts to “anything goes”. TikTok dance trends may be limitless. The truth is not.

Yet if TikTok shows us anything, it is the boundlessness of human ingenuity. There was nothing inexorable about social media’s evolution. Nor is its future certain. It is what we make it.