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's leader, Nigel Farage, [outperformed all other parties and candidates](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/26/nigel-farage-outperforms-all-other-uk-parties-and-candidates-on-tiktok) on the platform. We also exposed the [political content shared during the campaign](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/04/ukpolitics-how-the-2024-general-election-has-played-out-on-tiktok) aimed at young audiences. During the session, we will also show how to set up accounts that are located in countries different to the one where the reporting team is based. We will also show the scraper to automatically gather 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 also show 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 to manually find more related videos - and therefore Tiktokkers - similar to those we were investigating.
