TikStance: A Multimodal and Hierarchical Dataset for Multi-target Stance Analysis in TikTok Political Conversations
2026-07-16 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created TikStance, a new dataset from TikTok that includes short political videos and their related comment threads, focusing on discussions about Trump, Biden, and Harris. Each video and comment is labeled to show if it favors, opposes, or is neutral about the political figure. They carefully checked these labels for agreement between people to make the dataset reliable. This dataset helps study how people express opinions in both video content and conversations around it, supporting research in political communication and AI understanding of mixed media discussions.
stance detectionmultimodal datasetTikTokpolitical discoursehierarchical conversationsannotation agreementKrippendorff's alphanatural language processingsocial media analysis2024 U.S. election
Authors
Yazhi Zhang, Fuqiang Niu, Bowen Zhang
Abstract
Political discourse has increasingly moved to short-video platforms, yet computational analysis of such content remains constrained by the scarcity of datasets that jointly preserve audiovisual information and hierarchical conversations. Here we present TikStance, a multimodal and context-aware dataset comprising 161 videos and 13,876 comments from TikTok, designed for stance detection in political discussions. The dataset covers three major political figures in the 2024 U.S. election cycle--Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris--with content collected between September 2023 and January 2025. Each discussion unit links a host video and its metadata to a parent-linked comment tree, enabling stance analysis within both audiovisual and conversational context. Each item was independently labeled by three annotators using a three-class scheme (Favor, Against, None) for video-to-target and comment-to-target stance; items with disagreement were re-annotated, and the final Krippendorff's \(α\) reached 0.743, 0.723, and 0.722 for the Trump, Biden, and Harris subsets, respectively. Descriptive analysis further reveals target-dependent differences in stance distributions and conversational depth, with nested replies accounting for 23.3\% of all comments. By combining multi-target coverage, hierarchical conversations, and reliable multi-level human annotations, TikStance supports research in multimodal stance detection, political communication, computational social science, and context-aware natural language processing.