Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that the German government should join TikTok to keep up with the social media presence of other political parties, namely the far-right AfD.
Speaking at an open forum event with locals in Dresden, Saxony, Olaf Scholz said that the German government should join TikTok in the near future.
The announcement came in response to a question about the far-right AfD’s decision to join the platform in 2022. “The federal government is also discussing [joining TikTok] and I think that is the right thing to do,” Scholz said.
According to Statista, in 2022 the majority of TikTok users in Germany were between the ages of 14 and 19 years old.
The SPD chancellor added that he thought it was important to be present and active on all social media platforms in order to be taken seriously, and from the perspective of social media users, that it was their responsibility to speak in real life about the things they saw online which are harmful or untrue.
While the AfD as a party is no longer active on TikTok, it is present on the platform via the accounts of Bundestag members and AfD parliamentary group members in North Rhine-Westphalia and Berlin. According to Tagesschau, 80 percent of AfD Bundestag members have a TikTok account, compared to just one in 10 SPD members of parliament.
In some cases, however, it is not clear to social media users that these accounts are directly linked to AfD members. Recently, a state parliament member in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, was found to be running an account under the username “@mutzurwahrheit90” (“courage for the truth”), which gave no clear indication that the account was linked to him.
Following the same strategy that many other AfD politicians have adopted, which focuses on sharing short, soundbite clips of speeches, Siegmund is one of the most successful German politicians on TikTok, having amassed 374.000 followers on the @mutzurwahrheit90 account.
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