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Political Misinformation in Pakistan: The Role of TikTok in Shaping Youth Opinion

Digital Disinformation and Misinformation
August 18, 2025
Maham Hashmat
3:00 pm
August 18, 2025

Introduction
Have you ever wondered if the app you use to entertain yourself can be influential enough to shape your political identity? Yes, I am talking about TikTok, here. TikTok is far beyond the little cinema where people come to explore different people and entertain themselves.
This app can serve as a tool to propagate political misinformation, manipulating the youth’s political opinion and serving as a safe nursery to strengthen the roots of political propaganda. From being a platform to chill out, especially during the times of COVID-19, to slide into sensitive matters like politics, TikTok has come far in Pakistan.
In Pakistan, the most downloaded and widely used social media platform is TikTok. And the major chunk of its users is youth. On TikTok, behind the short clips, dance performances, and comedy skits, there lies a dark reality of political misinformation that directly or indirectly shapes the minds of the future generation of Pakistan.

TikTok as a Political Tool

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The wide use of TikTok soon grabbed the attention of political parties, political personalities, and propagandists to share their visions, opinions, and attract followers. This has made TikTok a political platform, which, in the words of Josef Slerka known as the” TikTok-ization of politics”.
This politicization of TikTok is not very obvious but if you look critically you will observe the pattern that how cropped clips from any political speech with a high-pitched sigma music gains millions of views, how the fake news have been propagated by the self-claimed analysts in the name of “opinion” and how any influencer without having any credibility, support a particular party or leader and shape the minds of millions of his/her followers.
One of the research paper, named “Exploring TikTok Influencers’ Impact on Pakistani Youth” (2023), analyze the youth aged 15-30 and found out that TikTok is highly responsible for determining how people feel, act, and form opinions. From this research, it can be concluded that this formation of opinion can also be done through political means.

How TikTok Intensifies the Political Misinformation

Viral Nature of Short Videos
As it is proven by many of the researches that the attention span of humans has decreased significantly. This reality is commercialized by TikTok very well; any clip on TikTok is 60 seconds long, on average.
Most of the time, propagandists used this feature as a powerful weapon to misguide the youth. It can be done by taking any short clip of any political party or person without context and posting it on TikTok. As there is a lack of digital literacy, there is a high chance that people will share it without any fact-checking.
These behaviors enable the political or foreign rivals to defame any political entity. This can be seen in an event that happened in 2022, where a short TikTok clip of former Prime Minister Imran Khan went viral in which he admitted to being involved with foreign powers; however, the original speech was the opposite of it.

Influencers as Political Agents
The growing trend of PR can be seen everywhere. However, this PR is not confined to business PR’s only; instead, political parties are also using the mega creators or influencers to propagate their agenda among their followers. Influencers, due to their reach and influence, are an easy means to spread political misinformation.
This is a kind of soft power used by the political elites, where influencers can be offered hefty amounts to share a one-sided narrative that can manipulate their audience, especially the youth, to fall into the trap and stop using their intellect to find out the difference between right and wrong. Political misinformation feeds on the rigidity of thoughts, which can easily be done this way.
Political parties in Pakistan even accused one another of funding the influencers on social media. Like, after the imprisonment of Imran Khan, IPP and PMLN accused PTI of spending Rs. 870 million PKR from the taxpayers’ money to recruit 5000 social media trollers, to propagate its agenda.

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Algorithm of TikTok
The algorithm of TikTok is slightly different from its counterparts like Facebook, Instagram, or X. where these platforms’ algorithm works on user data by analyzing what kind of people you follow, what kind of content you consume, and what you want to see.
Instead, TikTok’s algorithm didn’t care much about whom you follow; its algorithm is more specific, it analyzes its user by observing what kind of videos you press the like button on, which kind of clips you watch, and for how long, and what keeps you hooked to the app.It means that no matter what your interest is, any kind of video can pop up on your screen. This feature also works in favor of propagandists. Once you get attracted to any political misinformation, there are high chances that you will get trapped in the echo-chambers, which show you the same content again and again.

Handy model
One of the other distinctive features of TikTok is its simple and user-friendly design. TikTok is easy to use for people from any age group or educational background. As the majority of the users in Pakistan belong to the young generation, this handy design works as an icing on the cake.
The young people got fascinated by how, in a very short time, they can catch up with the ongoing political situation in Pakistan. Most of the youth take TikTok as a source to get information, which makes them more vulnerable to being exposed to political misinformation and propaganda.
The other features, like commenting and duets, easy forward, and “for you” page, contribute to the feasibility of propagation of fake news without any fact-checking. In this way, large masses can be sensitized to the misinformation and easily and readily available false political information.

Way forward

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The growing influence of TikTok in Pakistan is not just about the spill-over of fake news. Instead, it’s about the real influence that it is changing the behavior of people, their feelings, and what kind of political opinion they hold, and who they are going to vote for. And the worst part? It is targeting the future generation of Pakistan.
The antidote to this threat is awareness only. When the youth start scrolling smartly, ask bold questions and put their intellect to analyze what they are seeing, hearing, or consuming, then they will only safeguard themselves from the political misinformation and fake news.
Because in a country where 64% of the population is under 30, and where social media is now more powerful than prime-time news, the future of democracy may very well depend on what goes viral next.
What you can do as an individual:
1. Ask yourself, is the news I am listening to from a credible source or not?
2. Is the news based on sentiments, or is there a logic behind it?
3. Could this be misleading to others?
This is the only way we can protect ourselves and our future generations from misguidance and make them believe in true democratic values.

References
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393429767_Tiktok%27s_Influence_On_Young_Voters_A_Review_Of_Social_Media%27s_Role_In_Political_Decisions
https://thestandard.com.pk/pti-accused-of-misusing-state-funds-on-social-media-influencers/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://vsquare.org/social-media-china-usa-tiktok-algorithm-disinformation-czech-josef-slerka-interview/

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