What is it about those Idaho mullets?
What TikTok hashtags say about states
I wanted to know what TikTok thinks about the 50 United States. To this end, I got hashtags for 100,000 TikTok videos that co-occur with state hashtags, and saw which states appear together the most, which hashtags are most closely associated with each state, and which states are associated with the most positive and negative sentiments.
Northeast states talk about each other a lot
First, I wanted to see which states appeared together the most, so I plotted the top 200 most frequently co-occurring states using a chord diagram:
The graph is a bit of a mess, but something I noticed was how northeast states talk about each other more than any other state. I was expecting most of the connections to occur between states with the highest population, but it turned out that most of the connections occurred between states with the smallest landmass. I hypothesize this is because of the extensive travel happening across these small states. Simply comparing the number and size of connections by these Northeastern states (top row, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, respectively) to the number and size of connections in the most populous states (bottom row, California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, respectively) makes this point clear:
Idaho and…mullets?
Next, I wanted to find the hashtags that are most closely tied to each state. For this, I listed the number of times each hashtag was used for each state. Unsurprisingly, hashtags of the state’s name, and massive TikTok hashtags were at the top for every state (think fyp, foryoupage, etc). To mitigate this, I combined the hashtags for every state, called it background, and found the hashtags that were overrepresented in each state. Below, I show the most over-represented non-state name hashtag for each state:
Mullet is by far the funniest, though I appreciated “masshole” and “wawa”. Note - Virginia is the name of a popular Brazilian TikToker married to Ze Felipe, which has nothing whatever to do with the state.
TikTok loves Alaska + Minnesota and hates Virginia + Mississippi
Finally, I wanted to see which states are most and least liked by TikTok. To this end, I used Huggingface’s Sentiment Analysis Pipeline to determine the sentiment of each video caption. I then plotted the most positive and negative contiguous states below. Alaska and Hawaii were excluded for visibility, but Alaska was (by far) the state with the most positive sentiment, and Hawaii was in third place after Minnesota. A lot of the negativity surrounded southeast states, though it is important to note that Viriginia was heavily impacted by a massive TikToker of the same name.
