In this session, we will show the methodology developed by The Guardian to gather and measure content published on TikTok during the UK election campaign. Using this methodology, we revealed how far-right Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage,
outperformed all other parties and candidates on the platform. We also exposed the
political content shared during the campaign aimed at young audiences.
During the session, we will also show you how to set up accounts located in countries different to the one where the reporting team is based. We will also show the scraper for automatically gathering content associated with particular hashtags at various times over several days. TikTok is relatively hostile to scrapers, forcing us to resort to advanced scraping techniques including residential proxies. We will demonstrate how we identify the main content creators, using some metrics from TikTok as well as the number of videos recommended by the algorithm, and how we used the algorithm manually to find more related videos - and therefore Tiktokkers - similar to those we were investigating.
