TikTok is the international twin of China’s mobile short video app, Douyin, and one of the fastest growing short video platforms in the world. Owned by Chinese tech giant, ByteDance, TikTok and Douyin share many similarities in terms of appearance, functionality, and platform affordances; however, they exist in radically different markets and are governed by radically different forces. Unlike other popular mobile media platforms in China and internationally, TikTok and Douyin are neither part of the big three tech giants in China nor the big five in the US. This provides an interesting case study to investigate how an emerging internet company adapts its products to better fit divergent expectations, cultures, and policy frameworks in China and abroad. Using the app walkthrough method informed by platformization of culture production theory, this study highlights the similarities and distinctions between these two platforms. We argue the co-evolution of Douyin and TikTok is a new paradigm of global platform expansion that differs from strategies of regionalization adopted by previous major social media platforms. We contribute to platformization theory by developing the concept of parallel platformization to explain ByteDance’s strategies for surviving in two opposing platform ecosystems in China and abroad.

In Chinese political discourse, "positive energy" (zheng nengliang) is a popular expression that has embodied mainstream political ideology in China since 2012. This term has also become prominent on Douyin, a prominent Chinese short-video platform. By June 2018, over 500 Chinese governmental accounts on Douyin had promoted positive energy in videos, and the content was viewed over 1.6 billion times. Douyin even created a separate trending section, Positive Energy, for videos that promoted the dominant state ideology. This study argues that the Positive Energy feature on Douyin is significant. The Chinese government has accused and even permanently shut down several digital platforms for spreading "vulgarity" as the antithesis of positive energy. Using the app walkthrough method and a content analysis of over 800 videos collected from the Positive Energy section of Douyin, this study explores how Douyin promotes the Chinese state's political agenda by promoting a new form of playful patriotism online.

TikTok, a short‐video app featuring video content typically between 15 and 60 s long, has become immensely popular around the world in the last few years. However, the worldwide popularity of TikTok requires the platform to constantly negotiate with the rules, norms and regulatory frameworks of the regions where it operates. Failure to do so has had significant consequences. For example, for content‐related reasons, the platform has been (temporarily and permanently) banned in several countries, including India, Indonesia and Pakistan. Moreover, its Chinese ownership and popularity among underage users have made the platform subject to heightened scrutiny and criticism. In this paper, we introduce the notion of visibility moderation, defined as the process through which digital platforms manipulate the reach of user‐generated content through algorithmic or regulatory means. We discuss particular measures TikTok implements to shape visibility and issues arising from it. This paper presents findings from interviews with content creators, which takes a user‐centric approach to understand their sense‐making of and negotiation with TikTok's visibility moderation. Findings from this study also highlight concerns that leave these stakeholders feeling confused, frustrated or powerless, which offer important directions for further research.

This study investigates copyright discourses on YouTube. Through a qualitative content analysis of 144 YouTube videos, we explore how YouTube creators understand copyright law, how they minimize risks posed by copyright infringement, and how they navigate a highly technical and dynamic copyright enforcement ecosystem. Our findings offer insights into how digitally situated cultural producers are impacted by and respond to automated content moderation. This is important because increasingly lawmakers around the world are asking digital platforms to implement efficient systems for content moderation, and yet there is a lack of good information about the stakeholders most directly impacted by these practices. In this study, we present a systematic analysis of copyright gossip, building on the concept of algorithmic gossip, which comprises the opinions, theories, and strategies of creators who are affected by YouTube’s copyright enforcement systems.

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Film, television, and music form a major domestic and export product in India. Whereas, in the past, content production has been restricted to professional producers, digital media platforms have drastically altered the landscape of content production in India. Through in-depth interviews of ten online content creators, the article describes motivations of online content creation in India. Discussion themes include professional activities, identity construction of creators, and quasi-corporate structures that are taking root in the democratized digital spaces in India. In doing so, the article challenges the notion of creators on social media as mere “amateurs” or “UGC” (user-generated content). Conclusions from this study suggest future research should take a more holistic approach to studying online content creators rather than classifying creators on the basis of platform affordances.

This panel deploys a range of qualitative methodologies to investigate how processes of datafication meet with the subjective experiences of ordinary people, and the practices of everyday life. We draw on the model of ‘everyday data cultures’ proposed by Burgess (2017) to explore the ways diverse data practices – including the production and circulation of data visualisations, modes of data storage and vernacular engagements with data literacy – can be understood as aspects of culture. Following Burgess, we define everyday data cultures as the practices that form around and in response to the social media and other data (and data trails) that people generate as we go about our daily lives. These practices form from our diverse engagements with, experiences of, and approaches to understanding and negotiating these data Across these four papers, we address the everyday politics of social media platforms; the development of vernacular pedagogies of AI and machine leaning practices; the historical datafication of sex and gender, and mundane workplace practices of storing, concealing and revealing personal data. In doing so, we seek to highlight and amplify everyday human agency, as well as explore its limits and uneven distribution, and consider how it is being transformed through the logics of data and the machines that feed on them.

The editors of this Feature Topic are founding members of the TikTok Cultures Research Network that focuses on culturally-situated and qualitatively-grounded scholarship on TikTok in the Asia Pacific region. This Feature Topic collection for Media International Australia is our second in a string of Special Issues on TikTok, each primed to interrogate the platform from different scholarly vantage points while remaining committed to surfacing, highlighting, and strengthening research from, by, and about contexts in the margins. In this Feature Topic issue, we focus on the Asia Pacific region to understand the socio-cultural impacts, creative circumventions, and agentic employments of TikTok since its installation. Given the timing of symposium and intellectual inquiries, these studies have also naturally considered the cascading impacts and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on platform use, meaning making, and the habitable spaces we make for ourselves and for each other in times of crisis.