TikStance: A Multimodal and Hierarchical Dataset for Multi-target Stance Analysis in TikTok Political Conversations

arXiv:2607.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Political discourse has increasingly moved to short-video platforms, yet computational analysis of such content remains constrained by the scarcity of datasets that jointly preserve audiovisual information and hierarchical conversations. Here we present TikStance, a multimodal and context-aware dataset comprising 161 videos and 13,876 comments from TikTok, designed for stance detection in political discussions. The dataset covers three major political figures in the 2024 U.S. election cycle--Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris--with content collected between September 2023 and January 2025. Each discussion unit links a host video and its metadata to a parent-linked comment tree, enabling stance analysis within both audiovisual and conversational context. Each item was independently labeled by three annotators using a three-class scheme (Favor, Against, None) for video-to-target and comment-to-target stance; items with disagreement were re-annotated, and the final Krippendorff's \(\alpha\) reached 0.743, 0.723, and 0.722 for the Trump, Biden, and Harris subsets, respectively. Descriptive analysis further reveals target-dependent differences in stance distributions and conversational depth, with nested replies accounting for 23.3\% of all comments. By combining multi-target coverage, hierarchical conversations, and reliable multi-level human annotations, TikStance supports research in multimodal stance detection, political communication, computational social science, and context-aware natural language processing.