Left and right-wing parties in Poland have used TikTok to influence young voters during general elections held in October. The statistics show that 70% of young voters aged 18-29 used their right to vote compared to 46.4% in the previous elections of 2019.
Even after elections, navigating into the social platform you can easily find a lot of videos by young people waiting in a long queue to vote.
There were three parties that used TikTok to communicate with young voters. Civic Coalition represented by Donald Tusk (401.8k followers). The far-right Konfederacja or Confederation (221.5k followers) and The Left or Lewica (79.2k followers).
Respectively, in the final results Civic Coalition got 30.7 %, Lewica with 8.6 % and Confederation with 7.2 %.
While the major conservative party Law and Justice Party (PiS), which governed the country since 2015 remained loyal to traditional social media during political campaigns, other parties were focused on new social media platforms.
Malwina Talik, a research associate at the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe said the most political parties on the Polish political scene were “sticking to traditional social media like Facebook” to target older generations.
According to Malwina, young people voted mostly for the political parties that were popular. She emphasised the role of celebrities through their TikTok accounts “to join a pro-election campaign”.
A study by Pew Research Centre shows that “Adults under 30 are the most likely to get news on TikTok. 26% of Americans in this age group said they regularly get news there, higher than in 2021 and 2020”.
The co-leader of the Confederation, Slawomir Mentzen with more than 800,000 followers on TikTok, aimed to target young men. Many of his videos received millions of views. He called for a single low rate of income tax of 12% and a simplified tax system.
One of the reasons why Confederation choose the Chinese platform was “to reach out to young disillusioned voters”.
Speaking to Interhacktives, Talik said that Law and Justice, which lost the elections failed to be visible in TikTok. “They were trying to do it through influencers at first. They had this special channel [Young Perspectives], but even then it wasn’t very authentic,” she added.
“And then they were trying to do it for their usual channels, but they published the same videos as they publish on all other channels,” she concluded.