Moral-Emotional Politics on TikTok

Social media platforms have fundamentally reshaped political communication, influencing political discourse and providing new channels for political elites to engage with the public. Despite significant research on political communication on other platforms, TikTok remains relatively understudied, especially beyond the US and with a varied sample of account types and contexts. This paper explores the role of moral-emotional language in political engagement on TikTok, focusing on how emotional content might explain popularity asymmetries across ideological camps, as well as its interaction with negative events, such as the Southport stabbings, affecting the diffusion of immigration narratives. Analyzing a large dataset of political posts and comments from elites and regular users in the UK, I find that moral-emotional language has minimal impact on user engagement, with neither ideological extremity nor negative shocks altering this effect. These findings challenge prior assumptions about the role of morality and emotion in political communication and offer new insights into digital political discourse on emerging platforms like TikTok.