‘Communism made me do it’
Disruptive right-wing publics as a polarising force in TikTok comments
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v8i161077Keywords:
social media, digital polarisation, public theory, TikTok, disruptive publics, publics, elections, polarizationAbstract
TikTok is currently one of the most topical social media platforms in modern democracies due to its ability to reach large, young audiences and the concerns over outside influences and the algorithmic nature of feeds. In Finland, the parliamentary elections of 2023 marked an increase in interest for the platform. At the same time, polarisation is also a trending subject in European social media and society, with TikTok being discussed as one of the drivers of this division. This study investigates whether TikTok comments reveal polarisation through the formation of disruptive right-wing publics alongside publics acting against disruptions during election campaigns. The dataset of the study consists of TikTok videos with their comments from the Finnish parliamentary parties that were present on TikTok before the 2023 parliamentary elections. The comments are analysed through a framework designed to uncover right-wing discursive patterns, with the goal of identifying disruptive right-wing publics that form in the comment sections of TikTok videos. This study also seeks to uncover the precise language used by commenters and thus identify what constitutes different blocs through vocabulary choices. The results indicate that a large disruptive public consisting mainly of right-wing commenters was present on TikTok. The language used by these publics was clearly leaning towards a confrontational position, thus polarising the comment sections. The study also revealed that there did not seem to be a singular right-wing disruptive public, but rather one that was driven by the nationalistic Finns Party, as evidenced by the language present on other right-wing parties’ comment sections. On a broader scale the results indicate that disruptive publics have effects on both polarisation and discussion quality on TikTok, and that comment-based discussions are relevant spaces of identity work on a video-first platform.
References
Battista, D. (2023). For better or for worse: Politics marries pop culture (TikTok and the 2022 Italian elections). Society Register, 7(1), 117–142. https://doi.org/10.14746/sr.2023.7.1.06
Brown, Y., Pini, B., & Pavlidis, A. (2022). Affective design and memetic qualities: Generating affect and political engagement through bushfire TikToks. Journal of Sociology (Melbourne, Vic.), 144078332211102-. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833221110267
Cervi, L., Tejedor, S., & Blesa, F. G. (2023). TikTok and political communication: The latest frontier of politainment? A case study. Media and Communication (Lisboa), 11(2), 203–217. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6390
Cubernetes. (2023). TikTokCommentScraper. GitHub. Retrieved from https://github.com/cubernetes/TikTokCommentScraper
Fraser, N. “Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26, 1990, pp. 56–80, https://doi.org/10.2307/466240.
Gamir-Ríos, J., & Sánchez-Castillo, S. (2022). The political irruption of short video: Is TikTok a new window for Spanish parties? Communication & Society, 35(2), 37–52. https://doi.org/10.15581/003.35.2.37-52
Gerbaudo, P. (2022). Theorizing reactive democracy: The social media public sphere, online crowds and the plebiscitary logic of online reactions. Democratic Theory, 9(2), 120–138. https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2022.090207
Gerbaudo, P. (2024). TikTok and the algorithmic transformation of social media publics: From social networks to social interest clusters. New Media & Society. Prepublished December 19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241304106
González-Esteban, J. L., Lopez-Rico, C. M., Morales-Pino, L., & Sabater-Quinto, F. (2024). Intensification of hate speech, based on the conversation generated on TikTok during the escalation of the war in the Middle East in 2023. Social Sciences (Basel), 13(1), 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13010049
Grantham, S., Cervi, L., & Iachizzi, M. (2025). Double tap democracy: Political authenticity in the TikTok era. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture & Policy. Prepublished March 19, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X251327232
Hansen, M. A., & Leino, M. (2024). Conditional single-issue political entrepreneurship: The impact of education and attitudinal predictors on support for the Finns Party. Electoral Studies, 92, 102874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102874
Herkman, J. (2024). “The loss of the populist radical right in the 2024 European parliament elections in Finland.” In G. Ivaldi & E. Zankina (Eds.), 2024 EP elections under the shadow of rising populism. European Centre for Populism Studies. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0069
Herkman, J., Sibinescu, L., & Palonen, E. (2024). Finland: Populist polarisation of the Finnish political communication. In E. Palonen & J. Herkman (Eds.), Populism, Twitter and the European public sphere (pp. 85–113). Springer International Publishing AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41737-5_4
Hokkanen, J. (2022). Ja jos se ei kelpaa algoritmeille niin sitten ei kelpaa. Se siitä.: Datakäytännöt nuorten poliitikkojen arjessa. Politiikka, 64(2). https://doi.org/10.37452/politiikka.109128
Honnibal, M., Montani, I., Van Landeghem, S., & Boyd, A. (2020). spaCy: Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing in Python. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303
Isotalus, P. (2017). Mediapoliitikko. Gaudeamus.
Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfs038
Jackson, S. J., & Kreiss, D. (2023). Recentering power: Conceptualizing counterpublics and defensive publics. Communication Theory, 33(2–3), 102–111. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtad004
Kligler-Vilenchik, N., Baden, C., & Yarchi, M. (2020). Interpretative polarization across platforms: How political disagreement develops over time on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Social Media + Society, 6(3), Article 2056305120944393. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393
Lien, A. N. (2024). A battle for truth: Islam-related counterpublic discourse on Scandinavian news media Facebook pages. New Media & Society, 26(2), 839–858. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211068436
Maddox, J., & Gill, F. (2023). Assembling “sides” of TikTok: Examining community, culture, and interface through a BookTok case study. Social Media + Society, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231213565
McCrory, A., Best, P., & Maddock, A. (2022). “It’s just one big vicious circle”: Young people’s experiences of highly visual social media and their mental health. Health Education Research, 37(3), 167–184. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyac010
Mendoza, M. E. H. (2022). Philippine elections 2022: TikTok in Bongbong Marcos’ presidential campaign. Contemporary Southeast Asia, 44(3), 389–395.
Moir, A. (2023). The use of TikTok for political campaigning in Canada: The case of Jagmeet Singh. Social Media + Society, 9(1), 205630512311576-. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231157604
Politics, governments, and elections. TikTok Advertising Policies. (October 2025). Retrieved October 24, 2025. https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/tiktok-ads-policy-politics-government-and-elections
Quick, M., & Maddox, J. (2024). Us, Them, Right, Wrong: How TikTok’s Green Screen, Duet, and Stitch help shape political discourse. First Monday, 29(3). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13360
Reijven, M. H., Ross, M., & Dori-Hacohen, G. (2020). Conspiracy, religion, and the public sphere: The discourses of far-right counterpublics in the U.S. and South Korea. International Journal of Communication, 14, 5331–5350.
Röllicke, L. (2023). Polarisation, identity and affect - conceptualising affective polarisation in multi-party systems. Electoral Studies, 85, Article 102655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102655
Sakki, I. (2025). Unveiling populist tactics on TikTok: A multimodal critical discursive psychology approach. In Imagery of hate online (pp. 153–171). https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0447.07
Sihvonen, T., & Manninen, V. (2024). TikTok-journalismi Suomessa. Media & viestintä, 47(1). https://doi.org/10.23983/mv.137083
Strandberg, K., Carlson, T., & Snickars, W. (2024). Nuoret ehdokkaat ja kansalaiset
sosiaalisessa mediassa. In Kestilä-Kekkonen, E., Rapeli, L. & Söderlund, P. (Eds). Pääministerivaalit polarisaation aikakaudella - Eduskuntavaalitutkimus 2023. Oikeusministeriön julkaisuja, Selvityksiä ja ohjeita 2024:10
Tajfel, H. (1978). Differentiation between social groups : Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations. Academic Press.
The Pandas Development Team. (2024). pandas-dev/pandas: Pandas (v2.2.3). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13819579
Toepfl, F., & Piwoni, E. (2015). Public spheres in interaction: Comment sections of news websites as counterpublic spaces: Public spheres in interaction. Journal of Communication, 65(3), 465–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12156
Ushio, A., Liberatore, F., & Camacho-Collados, J. (2021). Back to the basics: A quantitative analysis of statistical and graph-based term weighting schemes for keyword extraction. EMNLP 2021–2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings, 8089–8103. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.638
Venema, N. (2024). Counterpublics and structural change in media and politics: A theoretical framework on transformations within a long-term historical perspective. Javnost (Ljubljana, Slovenia), 31(2), 231–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2024.2342216
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture, 14(1), 49–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49
We Are Social, DataReportal, & Kepios, & Meltwater. (2025). Distribution of TikTok users worldwide as of February 2025, by age and gender [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved July 15, 2025, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299771/tiktok-global-user-age-distribution/
Weismueller, J., Harrigan, P., Coussement, K., & Tessitore, T. (2022). What makes people share political content on social media? The role of emotion, authority and ideology. Computers in Human Behavior, 129, 107150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107150
Zhou, S., Yang, X., Wang, Y., Zheng, X., & Zhang, Z. (2023). Affective agenda dynamics on social media: Interactions of emotional content posted by the public, government, and media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), Article 797. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02265-x
Zulli, D., & Zulli, D. J. (2022). Extending the internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform. New Media & Society, 24(8), 1872–1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Esko Nieminen, Pekka Isotalus, Kim Strandberg
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
