Social media blurs the boundaries between political and non-political communication. On platforms such as TikTok, content creators may communicate sociopolitical meanings not only through explicitly political content but also within entertainment-oriented creator communication, including lifestyle, humour and cultural content. This matters because audiences may encounter sociopolitical information and perspectives through content they primarily consume for entertainment, with potential implications for their understanding of sociopolitical issues.

Yet, research examining sociopolitical communication within entertainment-oriented creator content remains limited. This PhD project investigates entertainment-embedded sociopolitical communication (EE-SPC) as a communication process, examining how sociopolitical meanings become embedded within entertainment-oriented creator communication, how audiences respond to such communication, and what implications such communication may have for audience understanding of sociopolitical issues. The project adopts a broad understanding of sociopolitical communication that encompasses formal political issues as well as social, cultural, and ideological meanings related to issues of collective concern.

Methodologically, the project combines computational communication science methods with a survey-based experimental approach. Computational analyses of TikTok videos are first used to identify recurring communication patterns and develop a typology of EE-SPC. Building on this typology, the project will then examine audience responses to the identified forms of EE-SPC on TikTok through platform engagement metrics and computational analyses of audience comments. Finally, drawing on the preceding analyses, a survey-based experiment will investigate how exposure to different forms of EE-SPC influences audiences’ perceived understanding of sociopolitical issues, with objective knowledge included as a complementary benchmark.

The project seeks to advance research on digital political communication and sociopolitical meaning-making while providing insights that can inform media literacy and understanding of sociopolitical issues in contemporary digital media environments.