They turn the tables thanks to social media. Are you ready for politics in the age of TikTok?
Photo: Konstantin Savusia/shutterstock.com
Ideally, the video should be one minute long. Well, thirty minutes. Make sure you start dynamically, click. Have you published an untruth? Oil it! Repeat. Click. Share. And… win when others are arguing in the TV studio and putting up paper posters. Social media stars are turning national political scenes upside down, and popular applications are increasingly used to fight for votes. Where will “new media populism” lead us?
Numbers. They are crucial because they influence the reach. And the bigger the former, the better the latter. What follows? A wide audience and hundreds of thousands of recipients, often potential voters. For example, the TikTok account of Sławomir Mentzen, co-leader of the Confederation and this formation's presidential candidate, has over a million followers. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is followed by 530,000 people. These are the most popular Polish politicians on this application. Each of them also has a public profile on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook or Instagram. The Polish Prime Minister – unlike Sławomir Mentzen – also appeared on Bluesky (is a relatively new social media where many people and institutions move from Elon Musk's X).
The presence of active decision-makers on the Internet has been a standard for many years. These platforms serve not only election campaigning, but also ongoing communication with recipients (regardless of whether they support the policy or the other way round).
Sławomir Mentzen is the undisputed leader in popularity among Polish politicians on TikTok. Right behind him are Donald Tusk and Janusz Korwin-Mikke 19 STUDIO / Shutterstock.com
But since we're talking about presidential candidates, it's also worth taking a look at their presence on TikTok. Because each of the announced contenders has an account there, although not everyone uses it very often.
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