This study looks at how mourning is expressed using the hashtag #grief on the social media app TikTok using qualitative content analysis. In a dataset of 100 TikTok videos, this article explores how the TikTok ranking algorithms, which orders content based on previous user engagements, may connect people in mourning across the platform and how these platform-enabled interactions may shape grief expressions. The study shows how grief was narrated on TikTok, which sociotechnical templates (such as duets, stitches, and audios) were incorporated into such expressions, and how these expressions of grief challenged societal mourning norms. This article ends with a discussion about how different subcultural norms on TikTok are linked to the way in which ranking algorithms create social connections across the platform. This study proposes that the “algorithmic closeness” of TikTok users in grief allows them to challenge societal mourning norms in imagined safe spaces, shaped by the algorithmic ranking systems on the platform.
This study looks at how terror attacks are rendered discursively meaningful on social media through the concurrent use and reiteration of terror hashtags, which were created following previous incidents of terror. The article focuses on 12 terror attacks in Europe in 2015-2017 and their relating hashtags on Twitter, to see how various combinations of these were reused and co-articulated in tweets posted in relation to subsequent attacks. Through social network analysis of co-occurring hashtags in about 3 million tweets, in combination with close readings of a smaller sample, this study aims to analyze both the networks of hashtags in relation to terror attacks as well as the discursive process of hashtag co-articulation. The study shows that the patterns by which attack hashtags are reused and co-articulated depend on both temporal and contextual differences.
This paper explores how academic life became memeified on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many academics, and especially early-career scholars, workloads increased during this time. Female academics, in particular, faced significant increases in household burdens. This paper focuses specifically on the uses of memes as humorous templates for expressing academic work precarity on TikTok (sometimes referred to as “Academic TikTok”), between the autumn of 2020 and the spring of 2021. Using digital ethnography, this paper attempts to understand how the precarity of academic work was expressed on TikTok, and how social media can be used for community building among early career scholars, especially during the pandemic. The analysis draws on content by 20 TikTok users working in academic institutions, including myself, as a content creator within this community.
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