Tracking the 2024 US Presidential Election Chatter on TikTok: A Public Multimodal Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large-scale, multimodal dataset of 3.14 million TikTok videos related to the 2024 US presidential election, enabling research into political communication, misinformation, and social media influence.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive, publicly available TikTok dataset focused on election discourse, including videos, transcripts, and hashtag analysis for political research.

Findings

Analysis of hashtag co-occurrence networks reveals ideological alignments.

The dataset captures evolving election-related trends over time.

Insights into TikTok's role in political messaging and misinformation spread.

Abstract

This paper presents the TikTok 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Dataset, a large-scale, resource designed to advance research into political communication and social media dynamics. The dataset comprises 3.14 million videos published on TikTok between November 1, 2023, and October 16, 2024, encompassing video ids and transcripts. Data collection was conducted using the TikTok Research API with a comprehensive set of election-related keywords and hashtags, supplemented by third-party tools to address API limitations and expand content coverage, enabling analysis of hashtag co-occurrence networks that reveal politically aligned hashtags based on ideological affiliations, the evolution of top hashtags over time, and summary statistics that highlight the dataset's scale and richness. This dataset offers insights into TikTok's role in shaping electoral discourse by providing a multimodal view of election-related content. It enables researchers to explore critical topics such as coordinated messaging, misinformation spread, audience engagement, and linguistic trends. The TikTok 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Dataset is publicly available and aims to contribute to the broader understanding of social media's impact on democracy and public opinion.