ARTIFACTS, PRACTICES AND SOCIAL ARRANGEMENTS IN CONTENT CURATION ON TIKTOK: A STUDY ON POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES CONTENT

Resumen

In the last twenty years, social media are increasingly relying on recommendation features to increase user engagement and maintain their business logic. Platforms have transitioned from a model where users could explicitly choose content sources, to one based on their inferred algorithmic identities. Users’ agency over their media diets is shaped differently in this new social media paradigm. Platforms such as TikTok, where algorithmic distribution of content is the standard, afford content curation in new avenues. We build upon previous research on how the TikTok app’s interface design, as a technical artifact, aims to shape consumptive content curation practices at varying degrees of insistence. In this article, we seek to understand how and under what circumstances TikTok affords certain consumptive curation practices to users interested in political and social issues. In other words, how specific users interact with the app’s interface within their social context, focusing on how they adapt their consumptive curation practices to obtain political and social issues content.