Bundestag President Julia Kloeckner announced that the German parliament will have a future presence on the TikTok platform. She emphasized that, despite reservations, she wants to reach young audiences for whom social media is a primary source of information.
“Since such a medium exists (TikTok – PAP), it would be quite senseless not to inform about our work and not to present the parliament,” Kloeckner said in an interview with the dpa news agency.
According to the parliamentary speaker, TikTok is “not without its problems in many respects, (…) but it's not forbidden either.” “There are people on this platform (…) who don't get their information anywhere else,” the CDU politician noted. She added that young people primarily get their information from TikTok.
TikTok publishes mainly short videos, primarily for entertainment, but also for informational purposes. Some of them contain false information, dpa recalled. In the case of TikTok, owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, there are serious concerns that the app may be misused by Chinese authorities to collect user information.
The platform's potential to reach a large audience has been recognized by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the left-wing party Die Linke. The German government also has a presence on TikTok.
In 2024, 21 million people in Germany used the platform monthly, according to data from the Federal Data Protection Office. Globally, it had more than 1.5 billion monthly users.
The Bundestag is currently active on Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter), Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. (PAP)
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