The first time a politician appeared on my TikTok ‘For You’ page, I scrolled past them automatically. Politics belonged on the news at six, not between a five-minute craft tutorial and a video of someone cooking at 2am. Over time, though, that sense of intrusion has faded, because politicians have learned to blend into the background noise of our feeds. What used to be the realm of lip-syncs and dance trends is now crowded with party leaders and mayoral hopefuls, all angling for the swipe of Gen-Z thumbs.
Nigel Farage spotted the opportunity early. He joined TikTok in March 2022, telling viewers “it’s where it’s at”, and he wasn’t wrong. He’s since built about 1.4 million followers, outpacing every other major UK political figure on the app, turning pub rants and selfie videos into a rolling campaign trail. TikTok hasn’t changed Farage’s message so much as supercharged it, wrapping familiar populism in fast cuts and bold captions.
On the opposite side of the spectrum sits the Green Party’s Zack Polanski, consciously pitching himself as a hopeful, hyper-online alternative to politics-as-usual. His page feels softer, less like a rally and more like an online diary. Polanski’s short, intimate clips explaining policies while walking off trains or in the countryside, interspersed with cleverly cut interviews and voiced over edits depicting what he frames as the dire state of Britain today, have been credited with helping mobilise a huge Gen-Z base. He also collaborates with climate activists such as Dominique Palmer and Mikaela Loch, leaning into climate-themed skits and trending audios, presenting the Greens as a natural home for anxious young voters. The tone is different from Farage’s, but the goal is the same: stay in Gen-Z’s daily scroll.
Into this landscape walks Keir Starmer. For most of his career he has looked like the opposite of a TikTok politician: tie straight, sentences careful, interviews long and serious. Yet our Prime Minister now has a TikTok account of his own despite the app still being banned on most government devices over security concerns. As of 00:19am on Friday 12th December 2025, he had about 41,000 followers – tiny next to Farage’s 1.4 million, but still tens of thousands of people choosing to let the Prime Minister into their phones. His clips are polished and safe: Christmas-tree switch-ons, school visits, short glimpses behind the black door of No 10.
The timing isn’t subtle.
Over the summer the government announced their intention to lower the voting age for reserved elections to 16, inviting hundreds of thousands of teenagers into formal politics for the first time. Suddenly, the people who spend hours on TikTok are being told that their votes will matter. It is hard to see his decision to join the platform as a coincidence. It looks less like a mid-life curiosity about social media and more like a straightforward calculation: if 16- and 17-year-olds are getting the vote, you go to their platforms and talk in their formats.
This is often presented as “speaking their language”. In one sense, that is fair enough. Young people encounter politics through one-minute vertical videos, not party leaflets or BBC News Broadcasts. If a politician genuinely wants to explain a policy or invite criticism, it makes sense to appear where people already are. There is something disarming about watching Farage call someone a “cheeky bastard” for upselling his signs football shirts, or seeing Polanski poke fun at his own party. It can make power feel closer, less like a distant conversation between people in suits.
But TikTok is not a neutral meeting point. It rewards drama, simplicity and strong emotion. Detailed explanations of tax thresholds rarely go viral; confident, half-explained one-liners do. Farage’s success says as much about the platform’s taste for outrage as it does about his popularity. When Starmer appears between a beauty haul and a meme, he risks looking less like a public servant and more like another brand competing for our attention in under a minute. The boundary between genuine communication and slick marketing starts to blur.
For young people, that makes our relationship with politics double-edged. On the one hand, it has never been easier to see and speak to the people who govern us. On the other, everything they say is flattened into content, fighting with influencers, adverts and our friends for a few seconds of focus. Maybe this is what everyday politics looks like now: a stitched clip, a reaction emoji and a fleeting sense of being heard. But if the gap between their TikToks and our real lives stays wide, and, if rent, bills and futures do not improve, no number of perfectly timed posts will feel like enough.
Image: Alpha Photo on Flickr