German Far-Right Mainstreaming on TikTok

Alongside the far-right parties’ continued electoral successes, their topics have become increasingly more mainstream [1]. While some regard this change as primarily achieved through outside actors such as the far right and their supporters, others emphasize the role of politicians from established parties in the process of mainstreaming far-right ideologies, arguing that the elite’s role of shaping public discourse enables them to influence what is deemed acceptable and what is not [1, 2]. In this paper, we seek to better understand the driving forces of mainstreaming through the example of German political parties and politicians on TikTok. We analyze the discourse following the online posts of elite mainstream actors in Germany and how they relate to the themes discussed in response to content from the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). We collected a TikTok dataset of all videos from 910 accounts from German politicians and the comments posted in response to these videos up until September 2024. The dataset includes 4,325,464 comments by 998,445 users and 910 accounts from German politicians and parties. To analyze party-based discourse, we separated the comments by the party the account they replied to is associated with. We focused only on those parties who were represented in the German Bundestag as of November 2024 and analyzed different topics using BERTopic. We determined the most discussed topics for each party for the timeframes of 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 and compared whether the mainstream parties covered topics addressed by the far right and if they did so with delay. Both for the more conservative and more left-leaning parties, we observed that they adopted some of the topics discussed by the far-right in the previous year alongside some party-specific topics. The AfD did not adopt any topics previously discussed by mainstream actors. This trend occurs throughout the whole party spectrum, except for the German left party Die Linke, whose topics already aligned with the far-right party in the initial year but did substantially change in the following year. Regardless of whether mainstream actors adopted the far-rights topics in support or opposition, the discourse they fostered was at least partially influenced by the topics set by the far-right party. This behavior might indicate support for the theory of elite actors’ responsibility in mainstreaming the topics of the far right. References [1] Tjitske Akkerman, Sarah L De Lange, and Matthijs Rooduijn. Inclusion and mainstreaming?: Radical right-wing populist parties in the new millennium. In Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe, pages 1–28. Routledge, 2016. [2] Vicente Valentim and Tobias Widmann. Does radical-right success make the political debate more negative? evidence from emotional rhetoric in german state parliaments. Political Behavior, 45(1):243–264, 2023.