ArXiv

TikStance: A Multimodal and Hierarchical Dataset for Multi-target Stance Analysis in TikTok Political Conversations

Authors
Yazhi Zhang, Fuqiang Niu, Bowen Zhang
Categories
cs.CL
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15240v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.15240v1

Brief

TikStance is a multimodal, context-aware dataset of 161 TikTok videos and 13,876 comments (collected Sept 2023–Jan 2025) focused on Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Each item links video/audio and metadata to a parent-linked comment tree; annotations use a three-way stance label (Favor/Against/None) with three annotators and Krippendorff's α ≈0.72–0.74. Descriptive analysis shows target-dependent stance distributions and 23.3% nested replies; the dataset is positioned to enable multimodal conversational stance detection and political-communication research.

Why it matters

TikStance contains 161 TikTok videos and 13,876 comments collected between September 2023 and January 2025, covering three 2024 U.S. election figures: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris; discussion units link each host video and metadata to a parent-linked comment tree (nested replies = 23.3% of comments).

Key details

  • Annotations use a three-class stance scheme (Favor, Against, None) for both video-to-target and comment-to-target labels: each item was labeled by three annotators, disagreements were re-annotated, and final Krippendorff's α was 0.743 (Trump), 0.723 (Biden), and 0.722 (Harris).
  • TikStance combines multi-target coverage, hierarchical conversations, audiovisual context, and multi-level human annotations to support multimodal stance detection, political communication studies, computational social science, and context-aware NLP research.
Source evidence

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.