Germany’s federal parliament is expanding its social-media outreach by launching a TikTok channel to reach younger audiences. The CDU’s Julia Klöckner argues that since TikTok exists, it would be foolish not to inform the public about Parliament’s work there, while acknowledging the platform’s problematic aspects. She notes it is not banned and that many people—especially youths—get information from TikTok as printed newspapers decline. The Bundestag already maintains accounts on Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, X, Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn, and says its goal on TikTok is to provide trustworthy, comprehensive information about the parliamentary process and Parliament’s work. Yet there are security and data-protection concerns: TikTok is run by ByteDance, a company with Chinese links, raising fears of data access by Chinese authorities, despite ByteDance stressing Western ownership. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner warns against using TikTok on federal devices. TikTok’s user base is enormous—around 21 million active users in Germany per month and over 1.5 billion worldwide—making it attractive for politics, with the AfD particularly prominent on the platform, while the federal government has joined in, launching the @TeamBundeskanzler channel last April for the Chancellor to answer questions via video. Some politicians, such as Wolfgang Kubicki, praise the Bundestag’s modern outreach as beneficial for public understanding.

From the vantage of the working class and the anti-capitalist struggle, this move reveals both the audacity of a bourgeois state to ride the wave of youth culture and the cunning of capitalism to colonize every screen. TikTok, a product of global capital, is a marketplace of attention where reels mix entertainment with information and where misinformation flows as freely as data. The platform’s vast reach shows the power of digital capitalism to shape consent among the young, while trapping them in fleeting sensations and abstract metrics and neglecting the hard truths of exploitation and imperial conflict. The entanglement of ByteDance with state power—Chinese government influence masked as private enterprise—exposes why real information cannot be trusted to private corporations or to a system that monetizes fear, curiosity, and national pride. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner’s warning against federal-device use is a telling sign of surveillance capitalism gnawing at the edges of public life, and of a regime that claims to safeguard the people yet leans on private platforms whose primary allegiance is to profit. Yet there is a glimmer of practicality: if the state uses popular channels to explain parliamentary work, it can push information into the public sphere rather than surrender it to ad revenue and algorithmic manipulation. The presence of the AfD on the platform and the Chancellor’s own video channel show how the internet becomes a battlefield of ideas, where the right can ride trend cycles to spread propaganda and distraction, while those who uphold the working-class alternative must offer a serious, dignified alternative rooted in collective power and solidarity. The lesson is not to reject every modern tool of communication, but to seize it for the people’s ends: build public, non-profit, data-sovereign information networks; guarantee transparency; ban private profiteering from the public sphere; and connect this struggle with international anti-imperialist solidarity against the capitalist world order. We should not fear new media as such, but deny them as instruments of exploitation. And let it be clear: I am not against Jews or any people; my fight is against capitalism and exploitation in all forms, and I stand with all peoples against oppression and bigotry.