Overview
With over half of the world's population using social media, a variety of platforms have come to the fore, catering to diverse demographics with particular preferences. Twitter, rebranded as "X," is known for its written posts and trending topics, and is popular among Millennials, journalists, and commentators. In contrast, TikTok has emerged as a platform specializing in short videos that appeal to younger audiences like Gen Z.
The vast differences between such platforms raises interesting questions about the perceptions of their users. For example, critics may question TikTok users' interests in funny videos, perhaps labelling them as immature, while expressing concern over its data privacy practices or the fact that it's owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Conversely, younger people may raise eyebrows at Twitter users' desire to share and follow so many public figures and the commentary surrounding them, not to mention the influence of its eccentric owner, Elon Musk. Despite some negative press against both platforms, TikTok boasts over 1 billion monthly active users while Twitter touts its roughly 400 million.
To explore people's perceptions of TikTok vs. Twitter users, we conducted a fun experiment testing the overall likability of both users.
The Experiment
In November of 2021, we recruited 400 survey takers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular research participant platform, and presented them with a hypothetical scenario about a social media user whose favorite platform was either Twitter or TikTok (randomly assigned). Participants then rated how much they liked the person.
Specifically, participants were instructed to "Imagine that you and a new acquaintance are talking about social media, and they mention that their favorite social media platform is [Twitter / TikTok]."
Next, participants were asked “How much do you like this person? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely)” using a 1-7 survey scale.
Results
The results revealed that social media platform preference does influence user likability. Participants liked our hypothetical Twitter user (avg. = 4.47) more than the TikTok user (avg. = 4.07), a difference of about 10% (p = 0.008). Interestingly, there were no significant interactions with age, nor gender. Both younger and older participants rated the Twitter user higher (or the TikTok user lower).
Conclusion
This experiment suggests that people hold a slight bias against users of TikTok despite (or perhaps in spite of) its massive size and growing popularity. This bias may be influenced by negative PR surrounding the TikTok platform and tensions with its parent company, ByteDance.
It's important to note that this study was conducted in 2021, before Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. It's possible that recent negative PR surrounding Twitter (now "X") has altered it's standing relative to TikTok. It would be interesting to run this study again in a few years to see if the results change, assuming both platforms are still around.
Methods Note
As part of our data analysis, we used an independent samples t-test to test for significant differences in likability between our hypothetical TikTok and Twitter users. Statistical significance was determined by a small p-value and a large difference in the averages of the two groups. Statistical significance was achieved if the p-value was less than 0.05. Additionally, we tested for interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as age and gender, using OLS regression analyses with interaction terms. The study was conducted on Amazon MTurk in November 2021. Data and survey materials used for this study are available upon request.