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arXiv · 2509.15860

PoliTok-DE: A Multimodal Dataset of Political TikToks and Deletions From Germany

Tomas Ruiz·Andreas Nanz·Ursula Kristin Schmid·Carsten Schwemmer·Yannis Theocharis·Diana Rieger
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Abstract

We present PoliTok-DE, a large-scale multimodal dataset (video, audio, images, text) of TikTok posts from two German elections: the 2024 Saxony state election and the 2025 German federal election. The corpus contains over 930,000 posts, of which over 330,000 were later deleted from the platform (18.7% of Saxony posts, 39.7% of federal posts). In the federal-election collection, about two thirds of the deletions were creator withdrawals, and the platform-deletion rate we computed was 13.0% of all posts, more than an order of magnitude (14-19x) above the platform-wide rate TikTok reported. Posts were identified via the TikTok research API and complemented with web scraping to retrieve full multimodal media and metadata. PoliTok-DE supports social science research across substantive and methodological agendas: substantive work on intolerance and political communication, and methodological work on platform policies around deleted content and qualitative-quantitative multimodal research. To illustrate, we report a case study on intolerance and entertainment in an annotated subset of deleted posts: about one in five posts conveyed intolerance and a majority conveyed humor.

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Tomas Ruiz, Andreas Nanz, Ursula Kristin Schmid, Carsten Schwemmer, Yannis Theocharis, Diana Rieger. 2025-09-19. PoliTok-DE: A Multimodal Dataset of Political TikToks and Deletions From Germany. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15860

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