Home⇛PCS Review⇛vol. 16 no. 1 (2024)

Vlogging the Vice Presidency: Sara Duterte’s TikTok Content as Politainment

Jethro Bryan S Andrada

Discipline: Politics

 

Abstract:

TikTok, an online video-sharing platform, has taken the Philippines by storm since the pandemic, emerging as one of the most downloaded social media applications in the country (Kemp, 2021). Filipino fascination with TikTok has become almost an extension of public life, drastically affecting political participation. Filipino politicians, including Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio, who have long taken advantage of social media as campaign and public relations tools, have begun to create their own TikTok accounts to bolster their clout and reputation. As a Duterte, Sara’s likeness to her tough-talking father has benefitted her career in government, yet she has also shown on many occasions that she is her own person and not merely a carbon copy of the Duterte patriarch. With the aim of scrutinizing the image that Sara portrays for herself on TikTok, this study enacted a content analysis of the 33 videos posted on her account from its creation on December 15, 2023 to June 7, 2024. Under the lens of politainment, particularly entertaining politics, it was revealed that Sara’s image in the platform strays from the tough-talking, informal demeanor of her father, exhibiting instead two complementary personalities: a relatable persona and an efficient official. By analyzing the enactment of politainment on an up-and-coming platform like TikTok, this study’s results provide novel knowledge about how politicians can style themselves and maintain their relevance post-elections using the affordances of new media technologies. In a country where the celebrification of politics has naturally extended to social networking sites, it also provides further directions for research about how influencer-like techniques that bank on relatability and intimacy may be co-opted by politicians to keep the public engaged in their lives.



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