Review of political humor trends in TikTok, identifying challenges and opportunities for influencers and journalists.
This article reviews the state of political humor on TikTok, one of the most popular video social media platforms. TikTok is known for facilitating humorous content through sounds, effects, and humorous norms. Average users, influencers, journalists, news organizations, politicians, and political parties have started using TikTok to promote their political messages. Therefore, this article reviews the relevant literature on and provides a conceptualization of political humor on TikTok. We then discuss the potential challenges to political humor on TikTok, considering the nuances of political humor, the potential trivialization of political issues through humor, TikTok's reliance on the FYP, the volatility/ephemerality of humor on the platform, problematic humor, and TikTok's staying power in and of itself. Collectively, this article provides a broad review of the literature on political humor on TikTok, while also offering future directions.
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Zulli et al. (2025) studied this question.
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