TikToking the Black Box

Georgia Coe

doi:10.6093/2035-8504/9601

Georgia Coe

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/2035-8504/9601

Keywords: Indigenous, gender, sexuality, TikTok, algorithm, digital activism

Abstract

This article reports on the individual and collective digital strategies of two Indigenous sexuality diverse Australians as they navigate TikToks governing algorithms, looking at how algorithms drive political online activism. Through their online tactics, content, and collective moments of political digital mobilisation, popular TikTokers Tilly and Q reveal how they challenge racist discourses that are perpetuated through algorithmic bias and counter-code transphobic discourses found in mainstream media. They also expose how users strategise their online activism to force realignments of the TikTok algorithm by collectively resisting experiences of algorithmic oppression and machine moderation. Drawing from in-depth qualitative interviews and the theory of the Cultural Interface, this article exposes the structural ways that racism is embedded within the TikTok platform and conversely, the ways that its algorithms promote queerness. It also demonstrates how, through user resistance and mobilisation, platforms, and their systems, can be alternatively coded, however concrete, or temporary.

Author Biography

Georgia Coe

Georgia Coe is a non-Indigenous PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her PhD seeks to explore the lived experiences and digital immersions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gender, sex, and sexuality diverse peoples, as well as understand and promote their Social, Cultural and Emotional Wellbeing. Georgia’s research interests include Indigenous health and wellbeing broadly, gender, sexuality, digital platforms and connectedly, communications media and culture. Georgia’s recent publications are: “Writing Themselves In: Indigenous Gender and Sexuality Diverse Australians Online” (2022), and co-authored the articles “Transforming Colonial Social Suffering: Strategies of Hope and Resistance by LGBTIQ+ Indigenous Peoples in Settler-colonial Australia” (2022) and “Mobility Tactics: Young LGBTIQ+ Indigenous Australians’ Belonging and Connectedness (2022).