Public reactions on TikTok: Emotional dynamics in comments to the president of Romania's posts

Abstract

This article examines how TikTok structures the emotional dynamics of presidential communication during the initial months of a mandate, focusing on the official account of the President of Romania. Drawing on 44 TikTok posts and 29,756 unique public comments recorded between 26 May and 27 October 2025, the study combines multilingual transformer-based sentiment analysis, change-point analysis and co-commenting network analysis. After deduplication and temporal filtering, 21,654 comments were classified. The results show a positive plurality rather than a uniformly positive baseline, alongside issue-specific negativity around economic governance, justice and public safety, security, Moldova and democratic legitimacy. Validation sensitivity checks caution against strong comment-level claims, whilst a bipartite null model shows that much co-commenting density is expected from shared participation in viral threads. TikTok is therefore interpreted as a high-co-presence environment in which episodic affective pressure emerges around salient political themes.