Quality vs. populism in short-video political communication: a multimodal study of TikTok
[EN]The article examines how framing and actor identity structure attention in short-video politics using a country-level corpus from Ecuador. It assembles 4612 public TikTok videos from official accounts and politically salient hashtags, extracts multimodal text via automatic speech recognition and...
| Autores: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2026 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Salamanca (USAL) |
| Repositorio: | GREDOS. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Salamanca |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:gredos.usal.es:10366/170104 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10366/170104 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Political communication Tik Tok Populism Ecuador 5910.02 Medios de Comunicación de Masas 6308.02 Sociolingüística 5902.04 Política de Comunicaciones 1203.99 Otras |
| Sumario: | [EN]The article examines how framing and actor identity structure attention in short-video politics using a country-level corpus from Ecuador. It assembles 4612 public TikTok videos from official accounts and politically salient hashtags, extracts multimodal text via automatic speech recognition and on-screen OCR, and constructs two continuous indices: a quality index (programmatic, efficacy-oriented content) and a populism index (antagonistic, people-versus-elite cues). Engagement is modeled as a fractional response (binomial GLM with logit link), with robustness checks using OLS on logit(ER) and Poisson counts with an offset for log(plays + 1). Models include affect (positive sentiment and anger), hour/day controls, and actor fixed effects (leader, creator, institution, party, and media). The indices display construct validity: quality aligns with positive/joyful tone and populism with anger. Net of controls, populism is positively and consistently associated with engagement across estimators; quality is small and often null or negative. Effects are heterogeneous: leaders gain under both frames, creators primarily under populism, and media modestly under populism, while institutions face penalties under both, and parties show limited returns. Monthly series reveal event-linked intensification of populism, and hashtag networks are modular, mapping onto institutional, partisan, and creator ecosystems. A design analysis identifies a non-populist pathway—benefit-first micro-explanations, concise captions, targeted hashtags, and joyful/efficacy affect—that raises engagement without antagonism. The study contributes a reproducible, open-source pipeline for survey-free, multimodal framing measurement and clarifies how persona × frame interactions and meso-level discursive structure jointly organize attention in short-video politics. |
|---|