TikTok’s Spiral of Antisemitism

Abstract

The growing presence of antisemitism on social media platforms has become more prominent in recent years. Yet, while most of the scholarly attention has been focused on leading platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, the extremist immigration to other platforms like TikTok went unnoticed. TikTok is the fastest-growing application today, attracting a huge audience of 1.2 billion active users, mostly children and teenagers. This report is based on two studies, conducted in 2020 and 2021, applying a systematic content analysis of TikTok videos, comments, and even usernames. Data were collected twice, in two four-month periods, February–May 2020 and February–May 2021, to allow for comparisons of changes and trends over time. Our findings highlighted the alarming presence of extreme antisemitic messages in video clips, songs, comments, texts, pictures, and symbols presented in TikTok’s content. TikTok’s algorithm is even more disconcerting since it leads to a spiral of hate: it pushes users who unintentionally view disturbing content to view more. Considering TikTok’s young demographic, these findings are more than alarming; TikTok even fails to apply its own Terms of Service, which do not allow content “deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, or are intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people or include threats of physical violence”.

TikTok and Political Communication: The Latest Frontier of Politainment? A Case Study

“…Finally, an emerging stream of literature is shedding light on how TikTok can also be a source of political polarization and hate speech (Weimann & Masri, 2021), converting into the hotbed for populist right-wing parties' communication (Castro Martínez & Días Morilla, 2021).…”

“…In this scenario, TikTok, the platform for dances and frivolous trends (Abidin, 2020), as an adaptive social media that can be exploited in many different ways (Weimann & Masri, 2021), is emerging as an opportunity for political communication .…”

Leveraging Rights of Data Subjects for Social Media Analysis: Studying TikTok via Data Donations

“…Much of the prior work on TikTok has studied the recommendation algorithm [40,1,6,18,35,34], the content on the platform [3,13,28,46,19,48,37,21,44,45,31], and performed user studies on TikTok users [49,32,17,18,26,8,30,22]. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to investigate user behavior through the lens of data donated directly from users using the rights of data subjects.…”

Remixing war: An analysis of the reimagination of the Russian–Ukraine war on TikTok

“…In research on uses and gratifications of TikTok use entertainment, affective needs, escapism and self-expression emerge as the most relevant drivers of TikTok usage (Bucknell Bossen and Kottasz, 2020;Omar and Dequan, 2020;Shao and Lee, 2020). However, research has shown that the platform is also used for political communication (Medina Serrano et al, 2020) and hate speech (Weimann and Masri, 2021).…”