TikTok, it's time for the truth
Platforms such as TikTok play an important role as one of the main sources of information for young audiences - and not only for them. However, the public is concerned with the amount of misleading information present on the platform. One of the responses to this issue is the emergence of fact-checking videos on TikTok. Journalists worldwide publish their findings as TikTok videos, making them more readily accessible for the average viewer. Necessarily, these posts differ greatly from classical fact-checking articles, which rely on verbal modes of communication to a great extent.
The dissertation addresses this phenomenon by creating tools for reliable analysis of persuasion and communication in TikTok videos and by studying a corpus of fact-checking videos from around the world. Following a fine-grained, frame-by-frame analysis using the specifically tailored annotation scheme for TikTok, Grzenkowicz distinguishes the ways in which fact-checkers use TikTok to debunk misleading information.
In the qualitative part of the research, the author dissects how fact-checkers use multimodal materials as proof when judging the veracity of misleading and AI-altered videos. In the quantitative part, Grzenkowicz describes the two main tendencies in the communication of fact-checkers on TikTok, who, on the one hand, try to imitate the stereotypical, straightforward, amateur style, while at the same time signalling their professionalism and journalistic ethos.
Furthermore, in the methodological-theoretical part, the author engages with multimodality research, speech act theory, argumentation theory, and informal logic to show how pictures, sounds, and other non-verbal materials can express statements.