The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Carlos Entrena-Serrano and Tom Wright, whose interest is in TikTok creators’ response to the Trump government’s efforts to affect how TikTok works. Both Trump and Biden pushed for a change in ownership in TikTok’s US operations during their Presidencies; this has the potential to profoundly affect millions of users, especially if it ends up changing what content is promoted by the platform.
TikTok is now a sociotechnical assemblage that is deeply embedded into the lives of its many users; efforts to change how it works are an infrastructural inversion which reverses the general trend for infrastructure to disappear from view (except when it breaks down). Much of this is about TikTok’s algorithmic governance framework, of course, which profoundly structures and governs social relations on the platform and determines what content is highly visible to its users. The algorithmic recommendation system has unprecedented capacity for private ordering, amplifying some and downranking other content, perspectives, and communities.
This produces an algorithmic, continuous, and potentially endless flow of content – and whoever controls the algorithm exercises a kind of broadcast-style control over what audiences encounter on the site. Trump infamously ‘joked’ that he would make the algorithm all-MAGA; but what does the algorithm actually show?
This project explored this through two fresh burner accounts engaging on TikTok, capturing the videos about the US takeover of TikTok that these accounts were served, and coding their content.
Key themes that emerged were praising TikTok’s democratic potential, through these algorithmic recommendations; presenting the US government’s interference with TikTok as a fight for attention, pushing back against the Chinese influence that might have existed before; and highlighted allegations of modifications to the algorithmic recommendation system (especially following the brief ban of TikTok in the US).
This displays a heightened sensitivity to the impact of TikTok ownership and control arrangements on how creators and users experience the platform, and show creators’ diagnostic capacity to anticipate subsequent developments, including the enrolment of TikTok as a tool of state surveillance since the change in control which eventually occurred.
