Majority Rules: Polarizing Content Dissemination and User Experience on TikTok

Abstract

We investigate the issue of stance representation at the platform level, and differences in experience at the individual level, in the context of two controversial, mostly two-sided issues: the legality of abortion in the U.S., and the Israel/Hamas conflict; we do so on TikTok. In manually annotated representative samples containing over 3.8k videos and spanning a combined 37 weeks, we measure the number of videos available on the platform and the views these videos receive, separated by the stance they represent (Pro Choice vs. Pro Life, and Pro Israel vs. Pro Palestine). We complement these platform-level analyses with a contemporaneous estimate of TikTok user opinions and a survey of users' content recommendation experiences. Around 34.5% of TikTok users identified as Pro Life and 53.7% as Pro Israel in Pew surveys fielded close to our topic time frames. However, at the platform level, we find that videos labeled as either Pro Life or Pro Israel are markedly underrepresented both in terms of video counts and viewership; we found only 3.2% of abortion-related videos (3.0% of views) represented a Pro Life stance, and 8.4% of Israel/Hamas-related videos (12.0% of views) represented a Pro Israel stance, respectively. Pro Choice and Pro Palestine respondents tended to be shown mostly videos in line with their opinion, users aligned with the opposing opinions were more likely to report being shown mostly videos they disagreed with, or seeing less on-topic content overall.