The TikTokification of politics: Will it engage young people or does it miss the point entirely?

On Monday, 4 August, the UK–France treaty targeting illegal Channel crossings came into force. Home secretary Yvette Cooper did the usual media rounds that senior government ministers are wheeled out for during big policy announcements, sitting down with the BBC, Sky and other legacy broadcasters.

What was different this time was her parallel push onto social media. Not repurposed clips from TV, but planned interviews for three different audiences: Simple Politics (880,000 followers on Instagram), Politics UK (367,000 followers on X), and the Daily Mail’s TikTok account (2.3 million followers).

It’s one of the first noticeable times a senior government figure has included social media accounts in what has been a historically closed media round for traditional outlets. The move comes as the government plans to lower the voting age to 16, and political engagement for under-25s increasingly happens on phones rather than TV screens.

Read more:

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• Giving 16-year-olds the vote: Will it beat far-right populism or does it play right into Farage’s hands?

“Young people want politicians to talk to them in ways they understand, using language they understand, and using references they understand,” says Ian Pope, head of programmes at The Politics Project. “So it does make sense for politicians to be thinking about ways of using social media to get across information in a more accessible way.” 

The Politics Project works with young people aged nine to 25 to build political literacy and confidence. While younger students aren’t bringing social media into the conversation yet, he says it starts to feature heavily from mid-teens onwards.

“We don’t find it in the younger end of secondary school… probably about 14 or 15, it starts to come up,” Pope explains. “Often they’re talking about news they’ve seen on social media, and they talk about [these platforms] as being a source of news for them.”

This matches what Dr James Dennis has seen in his research. Dennis, a researcher based at the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies at Universidade Lusófona, has spent nearly 15 years studying how social media is reshaping political communication. His latest book looks at how young people experiencing inequality engage with news and politics.

“I interviewed young people who experienced inequality from around England last summer in the immediate aftermath of the general election. One of the things I spoke to them about was their news habits,” he explains. “Across that sample, I found consistently that TikTok, Instagram and especially reels on Instagram and YouTube, were the key social media platforms that were being used to consume news content and information about the election.”

Tone trouble

But getting a politician in front of young people on social media isn’t the same as actually connecting with them. Comparing Yvette Cooper’s social media appearances to the rest of the respective platforms’ usual engagement and impression rates, the views and interactions were noticeably lower than other content these accounts post.

On Politics UK, Cooper’s interview pulled in 220 likes and 48.7k impressions, well below the account’s usual 2,000-plus likes and hundreds of thousands of impressions. On Simple Politics, her carousel post received 827 likes, compared with the account’s usual minimum of 2,000. The Daily Mail’s TikTok clips got 22k and 62.6k views, where surrounding videos on the page were in the hundreds of thousands.

Both Pope and Dennis say the format and tone of the content matter just as much as the message.

“Don’t patronise [young people]. Try not to use jargon and try to avoid professionalised language,” Dennis says. “I did a project a few years ago on this and one of the key things that puts off younger audiences that I interviewed is that in legacy news media coverage… they often use language and talk about topics in a way that isn’t relatable and isn’t representative of their lived experience.”

Dennis says that on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it’s individual creators that audiences grow to trust, not institutional accounts. That means the professional, broadcast-style delivery politicians are used to doesn’t necessarily land.

“In terms of Yvette Cooper’s engagement here, the mode of speech, to me, seems very similar to broadcast media,” he says of the home secretary’s social media appearances. “It’s professional and distant. It could’ve just been cut from a broadcast interview. The aesthetics of the video don’t reflect the platform.”

There’s also the risk of missing the point entirely.

“If we go back to the election itself, there were attempts from Labour, the Conservatives and Reform to share content on TikTok and reach younger audiences. The interviews I did with young people last summer showed that those videos didn’t necessarily resonate.

“A lot of [young people] felt they were cringy. They were forced attempts at humour. And speaking to media and comms people at political parties, many of them didn’t feel necessarily comfortable in producing that kind of content.”

Lessons from AOC

Dennis believes the real motivation behind the Home Office adding accounts like Simple Politics and Politics UK to the press corps is about reaching people who have been left out of traditional political communication.

“Hopefully, the key reason is to reach audiences that they’re not reaching through legacy news media,” he says. “YouTube is now the second most watched media service, behind only the BBC… and especially for younger audiences, TikTok is becoming an important source of their weekly news habits.

“It’s about reaching people who have been left behind and not served through their engagement with legacy news media. Younger audiences, marginalised audiences – those who experience inequality tend to have higher levels of distrust in legacy news media. So using these platforms is a better way to communicate with those audiences.”

With the next general election set for 2029 and an expected voting age drop to 16 before then, both experts agree that getting social media right isn’t optional.

“Politicians, in the conversations that we facilitate, are really keen to find ways to communicate with young people,” Pope adds. “And so one of the questions I often ask them is, ‘How can we keep being better at that?’ and they say, ‘Social media.’ It’s a place where there are lots of young people and it’s their preferred method of communicating.”

“One thing that does come up is they often say… friends of mine or people I know, believe in things or see things I don’t think are right or don’t think are true. And we need better [literacy] on social media to tackle [misinformation],” he says.

For Dennis, the challenge is moving beyond simply inserting young people into the message. “There’s a big difference between talking about young people and talking to them,” he says. “Yes, the 2024 general election talked about national service, or votes at 16, but it wasn’t communicated in a way that reflected young people’s interests, or their lived experience.”

He points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a politician who has cracked the code: weaving politics into personal storytelling, using the language of the platform, and talking about other parts of her life, from video games to music, alongside policy.

“Yes, she talks about politics, but she does it in a way that reflects on her own lived experience,” Dennis says of the US representative. “She’s very personal. She shares a lot of information about herself and her own relationship to the topics that she talks about.

“She uses the language and the vernacular and the norms and memes and the popular language of those platforms to communicate with her audience. To me, that is an example of what works well.”

Suppose Cooper wants her next social media round to match the reach and impact of those legacy TV interviews. In that case, she may need to follow AOC’s model – creating content in her own voice, for her own social media channels, rather than letting other accounts package it for her. The challenge will be saying something that makes people stop scrolling and engage.

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