Welcome to the age of Tik-tok Democracy

Political dishonesty, disillusionment with politics, polarisation, and shrinking attention spans are pushing voters to judge politicians on vibes, not policies, leaving us open to manipulation by hostile foreign powers. Welcome to the age of Tik-tok Democracy.

His immaculate white shirts and colourful ties could give you the false impression that Romanian presidential candidate Călin Georgescu is like any other politician. You need only watch a few of his Tiktoks to dispel that misconception: the videos, which are a strange stylistic mashup between american cable news and Andrew Tate-style machoism, rarely feature anyone but Georgescu himself. Where another person is present, more often that not it is a podcaster nodding approvingly. It is precisely this approach that has propelled Georgescu, who had previously polled at 8%, to a shocking 22% of the vote, putting him in the lead ahead of the second round of Romania’s presidential elections.

Meanwhile, Maltese Tiktoker Fidias Panayiotou has taken a break from free-riding on public transport for YouTube clout, to instead take up his mandate as an MEP after 19.4% of Maltese citizens voted for him, despite him lacking any political programme.

He joins Jordan Bardella, the French far-right’s Tiktok sweetheart, whose party won a whopping 31.3% of the vote despite being repeatedly humiliated in TV debates, where his lack of knowledge was put on show for all of France to see.

All of them shy away from the tradition press, instead opting for social media campaigns, all of them are actively spreading euro-sceptic, pro-russian narratives, and all of them are winning unprecedented public support.

At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, some would argue that this is an expression of citizens’ will for change, but this new generation of tiktok politicians only offer platitudes in the place of solutions, platitudes which quickly fall apart under scrutiny. How then, can we explain their success?

It would be easy to point the finger at Tiktok, claim Chinese and Russian interference and naive citizens and call it a day, and there is no doubt that our enemies have exploited a flaw in our democracy, but that flaw already existed, and until we address it, they will continue to exploit it.

Over the past ten years, we’ve experienced a breakdown in public trust in politics fuelled by dishonest politicians, and a breakdown in the truth itself, fuelled by a failing media who sought balance over truth, presenting both sides of the argument without giving citizens the tools to understand which is the truth and which is the lie, muddying the waters to the extent the truth no longer matters. This has been turbocharged by social media that prioritises engagement over truth, giving a global platform to extremists who would previously only caught the attention of a handful of people.

This is what has undermined our democracy: in lieu of truth we get potential truths, in lieu education we get entertainment, in lieu of democracy, a grotesque popularity contest. Nuanced debate has died: anything that can’t be said in short-form video isn’t worth saying. Welcome to the age of Tik-tok Democracy.