Investigating the Moral Justification and Online Engagement Strategies Used by Extremist Right-Wing and Left-Wing TikTok Influencers

TikTok influencers have a wide reach among young adults. The potential for political extremists to exploit this reach by presenting extreme ideals as morally justified underscores the importance of investigating extremist influencers’ content in order to understand, and ultimately curtail, their use of social media as a megaphone. Guided by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we content-analyzed a sample of politically extreme right-wing (RW; n = 84) and left-wing (LW; n = 100) TikTok influencers’ videos (N = 1592 TikToks). Results revealed that: (1) like their non-extreme ideological counterparts, LW influencers emphasized the value of fairness in their videos, and RW influencers emphasized the importance of loyalty, authority, and purity, (2) calls for violence were more likely to appear alongside appeals to authority and purity, and (3) while the presence of political content predicted greater engagement (i.e., likes and shares) than non-political content, only about half of extremist influencers’ TikToks featured political content.