Political Influencers on TikTok: Effects of Message Appeals, Parasocial Interaction and Gender in Feminist Contents

Social media influencers (SMIs) are people reputed to create and share content with a dedicated group of followers on social media on specific expertise, among which are political affairs. By incorporating political content in between lifestyle materials, SMIs make use of the established connection with their followers and the supportive community they have built to promote their political values and beliefs as well as persuade their audience to participate in politics. The role of SMIs is theorized as digital opinion leaders according to the two-step flow model of communication, aiming to assess the effect of exposure to SMIs’ political content on the intention to follow. This also allowed us to account for the effect of parasocial interaction (PSI) in the context of political influencers. Further, we drew on Aristotle’s language of persuasion theory to distinguish between the effects of emotional appeals, rational appeals, and source characteristics (influencer’s gender). We focused explicitly on TikTok, an emerging visual-centric platform. TikTok’s unique affordances, with the For You Page presented as the starting page instead of Following, enable users to come across content creators they are not familiar with, opening more room for the formation of PSI than parasocial relationships. We conducted a 2x2 between-subjects experimental design to explore the effect of rational versus emotional appeals on the intention to follow and share among young women (N=154). Participants were exposed to TikTok videos featuring fictitious influencers (male versus female) to prevent previous familiarity and increase internal validity. Results showed that compared to rational appeals, exposure to videos containing emotional appeals significantly increased the intention to follow and the intention to share. Parasocial interaction did not mediate the effect of message appeals on behavioural intentions, although it had a significant direct effect on the dependent variables. The influencer’s gender also did not moderate the effect of message appeals on parasocial interaction. Our findings provide support for the rising relevance of emotions in online political discussion, being used by not only politicians but also SMIs to convey political information. We used anger as the main manipulation of emotion. Future studies will benefit from investigating the impact of other emotional appeals such as fear, sadness, and enthusiasm. Our study further elucidated the role of PSI in enhancing engagement among TikTok users. Additionally, we focused on gender pay gaps, a vital issue in the fight for women’s rights. Yet it may not evoke as intense emotions as other issues such as abortion or sexual harassment. Given that feminism is a popular topic on TikTok, the issue of gender pay gaps might not accurately represent the dominating discourse around women’s issues on this platform. The limitation of this study lies within the snowballing sampling technique, resulting in a highly politically interested sample, which might not be representative of TikTok users. Future research might also experiment with other measurements of parasocial interactions and more concrete participation behaviours.