is tiktok making me more “woke”?
week eight
With over 1 billion active users worldwide, TikTok securely holds its place along some of the most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Whilst Facebook has “timelines”, Instagram and YouTube have “feeds”, TikTok’s equivalent is the “for you page”, also referred to as “fyp”. In order for to deliver “accurate”, personalised content to users (including targeted advertisements), TikTok is highly dependent on data collection.
The heavy reliance on its AI systems and algorithms has resulted in the continuous scrutinisation of TikTok in regard to privacy concerns, especially for TikTok’s large majority of younger and more vulnerable users. Essentially, to enjoy the application to its fullest, you must allow TikTok to collect your personal data.
Twitter users express both awe and hints of discomfort at TikTok’s algorithm:
Over the past few years, Black and POC creators have consistently experienced racial bias on TikTok, which has most notably included incidents of shadow banning, racial abuse and hate speech. For social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, as well as AI-based platform TikTok, Algorithms have the power to shape social relations. When these algorithms and software codes are created, racism can easily perpetuate through its ability to reinforce problematic stereotypes. A study examining the phenomenon of racist TikTok trends highlights how implicit bias is more prevalent in adolescent users, making them more susceptible to perpetuating prejudice. Racism became a “viral trend“. There is something largely problematic about a platform that shadow bans and disregards its non-white users, yet circulates racist content to the point of it becoming viral.
A prime example of this was the viral ‘Renegade’ dance that was created by Jalaiah Harmon in 2019, when she was just 14 years old. Shortly after Harmon’s post, a number of mostly white TikTokers, including Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, posted their take on the dance. Both D’Amelio and Rae quickly rose to fame and popularity on the platform, and as others began to participate in the dancing trend, Harmon was almost never credited as the original choreographer. It wasn’t until the following year in 2020 when Harmon finally received the recognition and credit that was long overdue.
Unsurprisingly, this was not an isolated incident, as more Black and POC creators continued to be shadow banned, and/or left un-credited for their original content. More and more evidence also showed that TikTok’s algorithm was censoring activists, and tags like MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) and BLM (Black Lives Matter) were being removed from posts and visibility. 19-year-old TikTok creator Unice Wani from Perth explained that when she began to call out and address the racial abuse she was facing, TikTok increasingly began to hide her videos. This was further supported by an academic study that found Black individuals who posted about racism on social media were evaluated less favourably compared to Black individuals whose posts were “neutral”. Although TikTok claimed that these examples were simply due to technical issues in the system, Black and Indigenous content creators were less than satisfied with their response.
In response to TikTok’s algorithmic racial bias, Black TikTok creators began a strike last summer to address the silencing and dismissal of content from Black users, whilst non-Black users continued to receive credit for content originating from Black creators.
Whilst some users are worried about the collection of their personal data, Black and POC users continue to contend with the struggle of navigating social media platforms that inherently favours white creators. The mechanism behind these platforms is rooted in algorithmic bias, and must be openly acknowledged and challenged from the beginning, in order to allow marginalised groups to social media without such limitations and censorship.