The Political Reach of Non-Political TikTok Accounts

Research on political expression online typically classifies accounts by partisan or ideological identity, an approach that works well when an account’s political expression signals its political leaning. On TikTok, accounts often address politics in ways that say little about their political identity. We therefore take political expression as our starting point, analyzing 2,116 high-visibility U.S. TikTok accounts and 104,191 of their videos. A latent class analysis of self-presentation, off-platform notability, and posting practices reveals five account types: Political Specialists, Value-based Creators, Prolific Celebrities, Lifestyle Creators, and Intermittent Celebrities. Partisan labels were rare in bios, and the identity markers accounts did display in their profiles focused most on their professional roles, content creation, and family and relationships. Political Specialists, the accounts organized around politics, posted the most political content, accounting for 29.1% of political videos in our sample but only 10.1% of their views. Prolific Celebrities and Lifestyle Creators received 86.2% of all views for political videos in our sample. On TikTok, political reach belongs less to political accounts than to those for which politics is occasional, and classifying accounts by political identity or institutional role would miss most of it.