Location
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
7-1-2025 12:00 AM
End Date
10-1-2025 12:00 AM
Description
Social media has become an essential tool for political communication, particularly during elections. Social media affords politicians to share information on political views, interact with potential voters and present themselves in a favorable light. In addition, social media affords conveying feelings and emotions, which may be essential in creating an effective subtext for political arguments and influence. We refer to this practice as mood-setting. By utilizing the affordance theory and by engaging in quantitative and qualitative content analysis and multiple correspondence analysis, we study six successful newcomer candidates in the Finnish parliamentary elections in 2023 and their posts (N=145) on TikTok – a platform centered around concise audiovisual content. The analysis suggests that mood-setting is highly candidate-specific. Affordances of short-video platforms such as TikTok support mood-setting and creative self-presentation, but platform features are used flexibly to set different kinds of moods for influence.
Recommended Citation
Kannasto, Elisa and Pöyry, Essi, "Political Campaigning and Social Media Affordances – Mood-setting on TikTok" (2025). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2025 (HICSS-58). 10.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/dsm/conversation/10
Political Campaigning and Social Media Affordances – Mood-setting on TikTok
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Social media has become an essential tool for political communication, particularly during elections. Social media affords politicians to share information on political views, interact with potential voters and present themselves in a favorable light. In addition, social media affords conveying feelings and emotions, which may be essential in creating an effective subtext for political arguments and influence. We refer to this practice as mood-setting. By utilizing the affordance theory and by engaging in quantitative and qualitative content analysis and multiple correspondence analysis, we study six successful newcomer candidates in the Finnish parliamentary elections in 2023 and their posts (N=145) on TikTok – a platform centered around concise audiovisual content. The analysis suggests that mood-setting is highly candidate-specific. Affordances of short-video platforms such as TikTok support mood-setting and creative self-presentation, but platform features are used flexibly to set different kinds of moods for influence.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/dsm/conversation/10