TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Comparing Event Coverage in News Media and TikTok
Year: 2024

TikTok is a major news item, but what happens to news on TikTok? To explore this question, we ask how the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war on TikTok differs from traditional news coverage. To answer this question, we used topic modelling on a large dataset of TikTok news, videos, and comments and compared the proportion of TikTok coverage (i.e., videos and comments) about topics related to the war to their proportion in news articles over time. We then analyzed a sample of these videos and