TikTok, Virality and Attitude Shifts: A Survey Experiment on the Effectiveness of TikTok Videos on Attitudes Towards American Labor Unions & Labor Policies
Open AccessFollowing the 2020 presidential election, the short-form video sharing app TikTok established itself as an opportunity to potentially redefine political communication as a new public arena for civic discourse. On TikTok, users watch brief videos that often use vivid, high-impact imagery to drive high-arousal emotionality to reach millions of viewers. With this potential for impactful change, a survey experiment tested the randomized exposure of 331 participants on one of two public TikTok videos from the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) on attitudes towards unions and labor policies to determine whether exposure to a TikTok video is enough to impact attitude on social groups, or in the case of this experiment, labor unions. While there has been a steady decline in labor union membership across America for decades, the general public has generally held positive views of unions and there is a current surge in nationwide interest in workplace resistance and unionization. A secondary analysis tested the impact of the individual videos and their history of virality by asking participants who watched either TikTok whether or not they would share the video with anyone. Overall, there was insufficient evidence to prove that a TikTok video alone is enough to shift a random individual’s views towards labor unions or agreement with labor policy. Similarly, a video’s pre-determined virality had no impact on a person’s likelihood to share the video with their network. However, two covariates, a person’s ideology and proximity to the labor movement, each made a significant impact. Those with less of a proximity to the labor movement, as well as those with more liberal ideologies, were more likely to approve of labor unions after exposure to either TikTok video. These results are aligned with scholarly research on generational cohorts and union approval as well as the labor movement’s history of failing to effectively organize from informational campaigns alone. If conducted again, the experiment would use a different video treatment from the AFL-CIO TikTok as well action-based variables. In addition, a larger group would be surveyed using block randomization to better represent the general population levels of union membership. Finally, because these videos were viewed outside of TikTok’s highly-specific algorithm, which is used on the app to generate informational ecosystems to expose users to content they are more likely to engage with, future research must consider the impact of TikTok’s internal communications system.
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