THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TIKTOK: AN OBSERVATORY ON CROSS-NATIONAL CONTENT PRIORITIZATION AND PLATFORM-MEDIATED PROXIMITIES

Abstract

The present paper showcases a research tool that makes data for a global, cross-national analysis of TikTok available to and navigable by the research community. Next to justifying the necessity for this approach and providing an overview of to the tool, the paper illustrates its potential by presenting the analysis of a dataset comprised of daily snapshots of TikTok’s homepage collected over 4 months from 197 countries and territories in the world. Our results shed light on which content is prioritized by TikTok on a global scale, and introduces the notion of ‘platform-mediated proximity’ - i.e., the clustering of countries according to patterns of co-recommendations promoted by the platform. Preliminary results obtained on a subset of the data suggest that TikTok’s cross-national content prioritization patterns generate forms of platform-mediated proximities that, in most cases, follow geographical lines of clustering at the regional level, with notable and interesting exceptions.