{"id":4588,"date":"2020-06-28T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2020-06-28T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/blog\/tiktok-is-shaping-politics-but-how\/"},"modified":"2020-06-28T10:00:10","modified_gmt":"2020-06-28T10:00:10","slug":"tiktok-is-shaping-politics-but-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/tiktok-is-shaping-politics-but-how\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok Is Shaping Politics. But How?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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TikTok Is Shaping Politics. But How?<\/h2>\n

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As a place where millions of young Americans perform and explore their identities in public, TikTok has become a prominent venue for ideological formation, political activism and trolling. It has homegrown pundits, and despite its parent company\u2019s reluctance to being involved with politics \u2014 the service does not allow political ads \u2014\u00a0it has attracted interest from campaigns. It is also a space where people can be gathered and pressed into action quickly.<\/p>\n

TikTok was instrumental in the organization of a mass false-registration drive ahead of a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., where many seats were unfilled. It has amplified footage of police brutality as well as scenes and commentary from Black Lives Matter protests around the world, with videos created and shared on the platform frequently moving beyond it. They carry TikTok\u2019s distinctive and wide-ranging audiovisual vernacular: often playfully disorienting, carefully edited, arch and musical. It has been suggested by many, including The New York Times, that TikTok teens will save the world.<\/p>\n

The truth is more complicated. A team of researchers has been analyzing political expression on TikTok since, well, before it was TikTok. While nonusers of TikTok may think it\u2019s bursting onto the political stage rather suddenly, and that it has something like a collective political identity, the research gives a different picture.<\/p>\n

It depicts a diverse, diffuse and not nearly united community of millions of young people discovering the capabilities and limits of a platform that is, despite its many similarities with predecessors, a unique and strange place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In an email exchange, Ioana Literat, an assistant professor of communication and media at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, an assistant professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discussed the characteristics of political expression on TikTok and why it feels like a novel phenomenon.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited.<\/p>\n

The idea that TikTok is an engine for progressive young politics is gaining some currency among people who don\u2019t use the platform. What might outsiders be surprised to find on TikTok, in terms of youth political expression? Is there anything resembling consensus?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ioana Literat: <\/strong>I\u2019ve noticed this tendency recently, not only on older social media like Twitter but also in the press. It plays into larger debates about youth civic attitudes \u2014 and especially youth civic attitudes online \u2014 which tend to verge between utopia and dystopia.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, youth are hailed (or tokenized \u2014 think Greta Thunberg and the Parkland youth) as the future of democracy, for whom political expression comes easy. But on the other hand, people are worried about how they don\u2019t show up at the polls, or fall prey to misinformation, or don\u2019t care about newspapers anymore. And all of these are true; it\u2019s not an either\/or kind of situation.<\/p>\n

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik:<\/strong> Extreme views, ranging from dystopian to utopian, are voiced not only in regard to youth, but also in regard to any media phenomenon that is significant and new. As early as Socrates\u2019s concern that the written word would eradicate wisdom, every new technology has been believed to either be our savior (the internet will bring people around the world into one global community!) or our doom (robots will make us all unemployed!).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n