Euroscepticism on TikTok: Validating Automated Stance Inference in Reactions to the European Parliament

Abstract

How citizens respond to supranational institutions in emerging platform environments remains insufficiently understood, particularly on TikTok, where algorithmic curation, audio-visual formats, and comment-driven visibility reshape the dynamics of political engagement. Existing research has focused largely on party and media communication on Twitter and Facebook, offering limited insight into the everyday reactions surrounding EU institutional accounts. This study addresses this gap by analysing all 326 posts and 27,644 public comments published on the European Parliament’s official TikTok account between February 2024 and November 2025. Using multilingual transformer-based sentiment classification, zero-shot EU-stance detection, daily time-series modelling, and  co-commenting network analysis, the article examines how sentiment, EU-related attitudes, and interactional structures jointly shape the digital visibility of Euroscepticism. The analysis reveals three core patterns. First, the attitudinal environment is structurally supportive: neutral and pro-EU reactions dominate, while explicit anti-EU comments represent a persistent yet small minority within subsets that explicitly reference the EU. Second, critical expression is temporally volatile. A composite indicator of euroscepticism pressure shows that negativity becomes politically salient only when heightened anti-EU shares coincide with elevated engagement, producing brief, event-bound spikes rather than sustained adversarial trajectories. Third, EU-critical users are structurally embedded within mixed, interactionally open comment spaces. They do not form cohesive clusters or central hubs but appear as diffuse minorities surrounded predominantly by neutral participants. These findings challenge assumptions of entrenched polarisation in digital arenas and underscore the need for platform-sensitive approaches to institutional communication. For EU institutions, the central challenge is less one of pervasive hostility than of anticipating and managing short, high-pressure intervals within otherwise broadly supportive publics.