Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Renzi and then the Democratic Party. A little more than three weeks before the elections, the last resistances to the landing on TikTok fall. Strong resistance for those who, like Calenda, have declared their difficulty in “doing the ballets” on social media which records the greatest increase in users and audiences. On the other hand, the numbers mean that it is necessary to be there: 3.8 million young people are called to vote for the first time, about 8% of those entitled. How many are on TikTok? The data is not available in Italy, but globally 33% of users are under the age of 25. Talking to them on the Chinese ByteDance social network is essential in view of September 25th. Which is well known to Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini and Giuseppe Conte who have been on TikTok for some time.
A million followers, but communication doesn’t always work
Overall, the followers of Italian politicians are about one million, half of which are from the leader of the League, in addition to about ten million “likes” on their accounts (seven of which by Salvini and two by Conte). Numbers in strong evolution, due to the landing of Berlusconi and Renzi. And that makes even less understandable the announcement to Tg2 post by the secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta, of a “young dowry” of 10 thousand euros financed by an inheritance tax on multimillion-dollar assets. Own goal that finally convinced the Nazzareno to open the TikTok account, with Zan’s video on the rights.
But can politicians communicate on TikTok? The medium lends itself only partially to political content (which has been adapted to Facebook for years). Furthermore, the algorithm of TikTok is very different from that of Meta or Twitter: more than the fan base of followers, the “likes” count. The content has more viral potential, which has made politicians’ social media managers at TikTok wary. Preferring to try to adapt the social network to their habits: few graphic elements – gifs, filters and more -, if not the captions that relaunch the claim of their campaign. And poor audience segmentation (like Salvini’s post on pensions).
The rules for political content
Given the contamination of politics and ballet, TikTok – which prevents the sponsorship of political content – has activated an in-app Election Center to help those who interact with electoral content to draw on reliable sources and information, as well as specific labels for the contents identified as related to the 2022 political elections in Italy, which refer to the Center where they will find information relating to the elections. The Community Guidelines also prohibit electoral disinformation content, abuse, hateful behavior and violent extremism, through human technologies and moderators, thanks also to collaboration with accredited fact-checking organizations, including Facta.News in Italy.