#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community

Abstract

TikTok, one of the fastest growing entertainment platforms, is also a burgeoning space for hosting political expressions and movements. In this study, we examine how Asian/American women creatively occupy the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok to counter anti-Asian racism and form pan-Asian solidarity. We analyze their participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag as anti-racist space-making practices, which we define as the act of carving out discursive spaces to spread counter-narratives to anti-Asian racism and claiming space through their agentive, visual presence. Drawing upon Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as our method, we analyze 130 #StopAsianHate TikTok videos by Asian/American women and examine how their anti-racist space-making practices draw upon the features and cultures of TikTok. We illustrate how Asian/American women extend the discussion on anti-Asian racism to include their gendered and raced experiences, and challenge racism in affective and evocative ways. We conclude by discussing how their space-making practices foster an ad hoc community for Asian/Americans across differences amid rising anti-Asian hate crimes.

“We Are Bulletproof”: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate

“…Recent research also examines the patterns between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and #StopAsianHate (Tong et al 2022). A 2022 study focusing on TikTok video content created by Asian/Asian American women examined how #StopAsianHate could function as a discursive space, with messaging around strategies to counter anti-Asian violence and/or forming pan-Asian solidarity amplified through the increased visibility of videos to online publics (Lee and Lee 2023). To explore how conversations shift over time with the ebb and flow of the pandemic, we intentionally use a longer time scale to track the first instances of #StopA-sianHate and #StopAAPIHate at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, following the data until the end of May 2022.…”

TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Comparing Event Coverage in News Media and TikTok

“…Bandy and Diakopoulos, 2020 show how call-to-action videos in a US re-election rally could become uniquely amplified. Additionally, Brown et al, 2022, Hautea et al, 2021, Lee and Lee, 2023, Vijay and Gekker, 2021, and Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021 specifically examine the affordances (i.e., functions) of TikTok to understand how unique political cultures emerge on different platforms. Hautea et al, 2021 notably argue that TikTok's architecture "prompts users to engage content, not creators or friends," leading to political communities that are not grounded in established, non-TikTok networks.…”

Temporal Dynamics of Online Sentiments: Investigating the Impact of Real-World Events on #StopAsianHate Twitter Movement

“…For instance, a research team has used data mining to create a quantitative descriptive study on the tweets under the topic of stop Asian hate and ultimately built their analysis on five themes [9]. Another study has examined how a specific identity group occupies the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok to counter anti-Asian racism and its narrative characteristics by Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), which is a multimodal analytic technique [10]. Another study has employed a discourse analysis model developed from the theory of Teun A. van Dijk, which includes three stages, namely the text structure, social cognition, and context.…”