The US 2020 elections through the eyes of TikTok

This project has been realized in the context of EPFL Computational Social Media (DH-500) course.

Student's name	e-mail
Ravinithesh Annapureddy	[email protected]
Maxime Jan	[email protected]
Elisa Michelet	[email protected]

Project overview

TikTok is a video-based social media application that has recently garnered popularity and saw a steep increase in users. It was the most downloaded app in 2020, a year that has seen some significant times in the history of the US. One of them is the presidential election, and this study aims to comprehend the political communication about the election on TikTok. A set of videos that contained the hashtags from a predetermined set were collected and used in the analysis. The hashtags in these videos were investigated using statistical tools, network analysis and topic modelling. The results suggest that the communication is interactive, and the young people are talking about issues rather than parties or personalities. However, they season their message with fun and trendy challenges. Additionally, two categories of hashtags emerged. The first set contained the seasonal ones related to the election, and the other had hashtags with a theme attached to them.

Project architecture

├───img                 Images produced
├───data                Datasets used for the project
├───notebooks           Notebooks used for the project
├───script              Script used for collecting data