Conservadores en TikTok: Polarización social en el Perú

TikTok’s infotainment exposes users to disturbing and harmful content, mainly broadcast by conservative groups. In this paper, we analyze the political uses from conservative groups during the social polarization in Peru in 2022. Fake news, harassing messages and promoting violence go unnoticed due to the application's lax security of the app. From a qualitative perspective of an exploratory study, we studied videos and comments on TikTok from conservative groups, regarding only the ones with inappropriate content that is still available and violates TikTok’s policies. Findings show that these groups produce discourses that assume protective positions from moral privileges that represent current fears in hypothetical futures (temporarydystopian), build their communication from the perspective of the forgotten man or the deprivation of privileges (actor-victimizer) and isolate demands from political to an individual (sacralized-spatial) perspective. We have categorized our findings as follows: a) unsatisfaction, b) deprivation, c) relegation and d) oblivion. This article seeks to contribute to the initial research on the political-communicative uses of TikTok.