Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

Values are essential life goals that shape an individual's identity, choices, attitudes, and behaviors. Traditionally transmitted primarily through parents, value communication is undergoing a transformation with the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, which is now used by 67% of teenagers, with 50% engaging almost constantly. While much research on social media influencers has focused on marketing, the values conveyed through TikTok content remain underexplored.

This presentation examines the values present in TikTok posts, the strategies influencers use to communicate them, and how adolescents perceive and adopt these values. We manually coded nearly 1,000 posts from 100 influencers across various genres for 19 values based on Schwartz’s framework and identified different communicative strategies. Additionally, we are developing an NLP tool to predict the values transmitted in TikTok content, allowing us to expand our dataset and deepen our understanding of how these values influence today's youth.