TikTok

From Fanlore
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Website
Name: TikTok
Owner/Maintainer:
Dates: 2017 – present
Type: Social network
Fandom: Multifandom
URL: TikTok
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

TikTok is a short-form video hosting service that originally allowed users to post videos under 60 seconds long. This concept is similar to the discontinued service Vine. The app provides a licensed music library for users to add to their videos. Many videos on the app are lipsynching, dancing, and/or music-based comedy.

As its popularity has grown, the 60 second limit has been removed from videos and many users will post videos of 1-5 minutes in length as of 2023, though shorter videos remain the form.

Fan Use

Fan activity on the app shares similarities with how fans used vine to post short edits/fanvids and cosplay videos.

Cosplay

Cosplay on Tiktok is quite popular. Common types of cosplay TikToks include:

  • In-character lipsynchs to both songs and spoken voice-overs
  • In-character dancing
  • Cosplay Music Videos
  • Process videos of putting on makeup, making costumes, etc.
  • Transformation or "before and after" videos

Fan Edits

Over time, TikTok has developed its own culture of fan editing, creating short videos set to music, from clips centred around a piece of media, character or celebrity.

Tiktok edits often consist of a series of still images looped 2-3 times over a song. Some of these still images may be animated by the editor to give the appearance that a character is blinking, waving, or making other movements. These are often reuploaded to Youtube, either individually or in compilations with other Tiktoks. Tiktok compilations may be themed around specific Tiktok creators, fandoms, characters, or ships.

Some users make specific "edit audios" -- songs that have been edited to a shorter length and may include other auditory effects such as fade-ins/fade-outs, slowed sections, bass boosting, beat drops, clicks, or gun sound effects. These audio tracks may be used in edits for many different fandoms, as well as in non-fannish Tiktoks. These audios are often uploaded to Youtube, either individually or in compilations organized by mood or song artist.

Web Series

Some creators on TikTok, after starting out with skits or one-off videos, began to develop their videos into longer term webseries, typically where a single creator plays all the characters. Some of these became very popular, leading to fandoms for the web series developing both on TikTok and on other platforms like Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. When TikTok lifted the 1 minute time limit restriction, many of the series began to develop longer-term and more in-depth story arcs, sometimes having episodes of 3-5 minutes.

Some examples of popular web series on TikTok are:

  • Hells Belles - Focused on the souls who run the Hellp Desk and deal with souls newly arrived in the afterlife.
  • Death and Martha - Focused on Death and how they wrangle all the newly deceased souls, overseen by Martha, a human who died and ended up making sure the whole thing runs to plan.
  • The Nursery Nurse - Follows the daily chaos and troubles of a team of nursery staff as they juggle dealing with parents, children, and their colleagues.

Other Fan Use

"[fandom] as TikToks" are compilations of TikToks labeled with characters names as a subset of crack vid. These compilations are often posted to Youtube. The trend originated from similar "[fandom] as vines" videos.

TikToks referencing specific fanfiction stories have also appeared. These can include cosplay, with users acting out scenes, parodies, reader reactions or a combination of all of the above. In early 2020, Tiktoks made in response to a Star Wars reader insert fanfic, Fix Your Attitude, led to renewed interest in a work that had been completed three years before.

The Incorrect Quotes found on platforms like Tumblr also made the move to TikTok, typically using AI generative voices with images or fanart of the characters. This sometimes crosses over with cosplay as well.

One common video type on TikTok generally is the repeated use (causing a trend of usage) of a specific audio track to a wide variety of videos. These trends tend to last for a very short amount of time, almost always less than two weeks and typically much shorter than that, but thousands of users will create different visuals, ranging from art work to cosplay to clips from shows or movies, to go with the same audio track. Sometimes the audio track is a short clip from a song[1], sometimes it is a piece of dialogue from a show or film[2], or it can be audio from another TikToker's video or an audio version of a text post from places like Reddit and Tumblr[3].

Other TikTokers have accounts with many videos focused on fandom more generally, where they might discuss fandom culture, discuss fandom events and drama, comment on toxicity in fandoms and explain fannish terminology and concepts, join in trends but make them linked to fandom, or discuss stats or academia and how it relates to fandom spaces[4].

Commentary and Criticism

TikTok is heavily driven by algorithms. As a result, fandom spaces grew fairly quickly on TikTok, with the algorithm pushing many videos similar to other content people watch onto their 'For You Page', meaning fans could find and follow one another. Fans often stitched or responded to other fans videos and remote collaborative videos are also semi-common. Shorter music videos of 20-30 seconds replaced longer music videos of the kind found on YouTube and, for some newer fandoms that have a particularly large presence on TikTok, these kinds of videos are the predominant type that can be found.

The comments section of popular TikToks are huge, which can make discussion in the comments difficult to follow, and due to the search function of TikTok, finding older videos can be difficult (assuming they haven't been deleted, which also happens frequently), both of which can make checking back on videos or trying to find out if something is misinformation difficult. This, and the design of TikTok in general (pushing people to always be making content that trends) also means that harassment, misinformation, and other toxic behaviours can spread very quickly and there is increasingly a lack of fact-checking for videos on TikTok, which has caused concerns for fields outside of fandom as well.

There has also been a rise of multiple clips from various episodes of TV shows being uploaded and shown in bursts of 45-90 seconds; with some TikTok users solely watching the canon material through those short bursts of footage. This can lead to misunderstanding and confusion about the order of canon events and missing out large pieces of canon entirely if those scenes are not included. For example, comments under some videos for Ted Lasso had multiple users commenting on how awful Ted was for seeing Jamie Tartt's father verbally abuse him and then raising his voice at Jamie and getting angry himself during training; these scenes appeared in canon in the reverse order.

TikTok, Fan Works, and Archive of Our Own

Fanfic recommendations, reviews of fics, slideshows of fan art, and discussions about fan works spaces, particularly Archive of Our Own are all relatively common on TikTok. This has introduced fan work platforms to new audiences and brought new fans to certain fan works or fandoms. One particular example of this is how the subfandom of the Marauders has been heavily influenced by its popularity on TikTok.

This has led to TikTok users moving across to other platforms such as AO3 after seeing fanworks recced or discussed in a video. However, this has led to some frustrations arising between longer-term users of AO3 and new arrivals; particular around the issues of censorship, algorithms, tagging use, and fandom etiquette. From late-2023 into early-2024, the topic of fan works and monetisation also began to increase and some users have discussed how the constant supply of content to be scrolled through on platforms like TikTok may have influenced some of the lack of community engagement people are increasingly discussing regarding fandoms and fan works.

Censorship

Discussions about how TikTok suppresses[5] or heats up[6] certain types of content have taken place since the platform became popular. While there is growing indication from research and user stories about the likelihood of some topics being suppressed or censored[7], typically those about political topics or involving the oppression of marginalised people, the occurrence of censorship and suppression on other videos is less clear[8]. However, the theories about videos using certain words or phrases being suppressed have become so widespread that people opt to self-censor within TikTok videos, instead using words which have been referred to as 'algospeak'[9].

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

Taylor Lorenz, The Washington Post

As more people from TikTok joined AO3, longer-term users began to note an increase in the use of this algospeak not just in tags, but sometimes in the body of fan works as well.

reading a m rated whump fic where the writer goes out of the way to make the characters say 'unalive themselves' makes me fucking feral. You're a rated m WHUMP FIC ON AO3 fuck off with the brainwashed self censorship. like dear god. stop doing it. you're only empowering a world that denies nuance and discussion. you're denying yourself acknowledgement #just me screaming into the void

gurggggleburgle [10]

Other users were sympathetic to those using the algospeak, noting that the censorship of corporate run platforms had forced users to resort to this way of using language to be able to discuss it. Other fans also noted that, in some fandoms, there was a noticeable increase in fandom antis who were horrified that various types of fan works were allowed on AO3 and who actively sought out moderation options to get the works taken down.

A lot of younger users are coming onto Ao3 from sites like TikTok and Wattpad, and they’re bringing a few of their bad habits over. I’m not talking about placeholder fics or using it like a social media site — that’s a post for another time. I’m talking about bringing hate and bigotry into comment sections and harassing authors over their works and preferences. This shouldn’t be happening.

Ao3 is a website founded by a proshipper, made for proshippers. It’s a free website, and no one is allowed to profit off of it (looking at you, people who bind and sell fanfiction on eBay. Not cool.). The lack of censorship is the price every user must pay for that.

If content you consider problematic is a dealbreaker for you, then maybe you should find another website.

cometh-into-the-abyss [11]

Sometimes when this route failed, given that the fan works generally did not violate any of AO3's Terms of Service, the users instead encouraged their viewers on TikTok to harass authors and artists into taking their work down. For example, one young author in the Jackson's Diary fandom was harassed by hundreds of users on a fic they had written where they aged a seventeen year old up by one year to write a fic involving sexual content[12]. The comments were largely driven by a single TikToker's video calling for action against the author. After receiving numerous comments calling them a pedophile and telling them to commit suicide, the user deleted their fic.

Algorithms

Personalised algorithms and algorithmic optimisation have become widely used on much of the internet[13], particularly on social media sites, and a large part of TikTok's early success was that users found the algorithm was particularly good at putting content they wanted on their For You Page[14]. In more recent years, however, users have noticed that the algorithm is increasingly less about what they want to see and more about what TikTok wants to push to maintain constant engagement[15], which causes its own issues[16]. With the increase in algorithmic optimisation taking off from the early 2000s onward, there are increasing numbers of people, especially younger people, navigating online spaces where their only experience of the internet has been one fueled by algorithmic optimisation.

While users coming from TikTok are not the only people wanting or mistakenly assuming AO3 has personalised algorithms – users migrating from Wattpad are sometimes noted to do similar things – again longer-term users have noticed an increase in the discussion around algorithms as fandoms and fan work discussions continue to grow on TikTok.

Although AO3 has algorithms in the sense that statistics such as hits, kudos, and other metrics can be sorted by, and their default is to sort by upload date, there is no personalised algorithm or optimisation on the site. Some TikTokers who have come across to AO3 have voiced a desire for an AO3 algorithm like TikTok has[17] or have expressed frustrations over the lack of algorithms[18] (which sometimes tie into conversations about the lack of an official AO3 app) and have claimed that the lack of algorithm makes the site difficult to navigate.[19]

Others have noticed some increase in authors trying to "work out" or "game" the AO3 algorithm, due to misunderstandings over how AO3 works. Some users will delete and repost their fics because they didn't get the attention the author wanted and they blame it on the algorithm[20]. Other users are misusing tags to try and "get reach"[21], a common tactic in TikTok where people will use various tags, including those irrelevant to their video, to try and get the video to trend.

Fandom Etiquette and Community

Monetisation of Fan Works

An increasing number of TikTok videos, and later commentary on other social media platforms, about the monetisation of fan works began to appear. Many of them focused on the increasing monetisation of the fannish activity of bookbinding. Some users learnt that works such as Manacled and All The Young Dudes were being sold on platforms like eBay alongside many other pieces of fanfiction. In addition to there being doubts around the authors' permissions being sought for these works, other fans were concerned about the potential repercussions to fanfiction on a wider scale if corporations found out that fanfiction was being widely monetised.

TikTok, the Digital Dark Age, and Fandom

The digital dark age is a topic of increasing discussion amongst archivists; one of the Internet Archive's main goals is to try and prevent the digital dark age from happening, and fandoms have plenty of experience of the impact things like website closure on fandoms. TikTok, arguably more so than most other social media platforms, is likely to see a huge loss of fannish information and activity if – or perhaps realistically, when – the site and app no longer exist.

The difficulty searching TikTok in the first place, due to site's primary focus being on feeding users videos via algorithms, is compounded by the sheer volume of videos being posted a day, with millions of videos being uploaded every single day. Then, the difficulties that traditionally come with archiving videos such as the size that would be required to archive them create an extra issue for archival purposes. While the Wayback Machine will sometimes create archive links of playable videos, there is a lot of uncertainty about the criteria for that happening[22].

As many newer fandoms with younger fanbases tend to have a lot more fannish content on Tiktok than other social media sites, potentially a large amount of fannish content about those fandoms is at risk of being completely lost to the digital dark age.

Removal of Sounds by Universal Music Group

On 1 February 2024, millions of TikToks had their sounds muted after Universal Music Group chose not to renew their licensing deal with the app and the sounds were removed from TikTok's sound library[23], including music from some of TikTok's most popular artists such as Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. This affected many fanworks and in particular, edits, as the way videos are edited in time to sounds means that editors could not simply replace the sounds with other audio tracks without losing something from the effect of the edits. A number of popular edits lost their audios, including the Pedro Pascal edit.

In response, many editors began posting satirical edits using sounds from classical music, popular royalty free tracks and other general meme music, to illustrate what they felt TikTok would become with music being removed in such a fashion.

Impact on Fandoms

Marauders

The Marauders subfandom of the wider Harry Potter fandom is particularly popular on TikTok and some of the now widespread fanon can be traced back to TikTok videos. Cosplay, edits (sometimes using clips of actors from other shows), fanart, and discussions of fanworks are all frequent within the marauders tag. The fanwork All The Young Dudes being discussed on TikTok seems to have been one key aspect in the fandom growing on the platform.

Stranger Things

Stranger Things became extremely popular on TikTok after season four aired, especially focusing on the character of Eddie Munson. Many people cosplayed as Eddie either for short scenes, skits, to lipsync to songs, or simply while recording other videos.

Voice-lines from the show were remixed to created the "Chrissy Wake Up" song [1]which trended in various formats and song-writers wrote songs based within the canon material, such as Sapphire's song about Billy Hargrove from the perspective of Max Mayfield [2].

There were also many videos with ship discussions (and ship wars), short video analysis, reaction vids and other videos theorising about events that may or may not happen in the show.

There was also a lot of toxicity alongside this, with some fans of Stranger Things seemingly being exposed to normal fannish hobbies like cosplay for the first time and branding that side of the fandom "cringey" for the way they engaged with fandom. Sapphire, mentioned above, had to turn off all comments on their videos to prevent the barrage of hate comments and harassment they were subject to [24] [25].

Wednesday

Netflix's Wednesday was another show that trended on TikTok for a long time, specifically the dance scene from episode four[26]. Interestingly, while the scene in the show has Wednesday dancing to Goo Goo Muck by The Cramps, many TikTok videos instead used Lady Gaga's Bloody Mary. This scene and others, as well as marketing for the show, felt to some as though they had been done specifically with a potential TikTok audience in mind. With Stranger Things moving to it's final season, it was suggested Netflix were actively looking for their next big series to take over from it[27].

Let's be completely honest here though, the scene was shoehorned in precisely because it would go viral amongst the tiktok kiddies, and it's worked wonders. The type of person who replicates this on tiktok and/or watches other people doing it don't really care about internal consistency within the show/character.

klopptimus-prime [28]

Women's Sports

During the 2022 UEFA Women’s Euros and, later, the Women's World Cup, accounts focused on women's sports and fannish discussions around those sports began to first appear with regularity and then gained increasing popularity, moving beyond football and into other sports. Events, achievements, celebrations, and controversies – both within the game and outside of it – were commented on as much as the games themselves and some TikTokers, such as Jackie J, built their platforms on celebrating and discussing women's sports. Other fannish videos like reels of footage of players like Lucy Bronze, Marta, Mary Earps, and Zećira Mušović set to various backing tracks become popular during the World Cup.

The attention women's sports received on TikTok did not go unnoticed by sports' media or the teams or players themselves, and it provided a means of promoting women's sports to an audience without some of the barriers faced via more traditional means. For example, English team Burnley FC Women's Team streamed all of their videos live on TikTok, providing free viewing of their games to fans and gaining a significant amount of fans in the process[29].

Fan Work Examples on TikTok

Trends in Vidding

Fannish Accounts and Creators

References

  1. ^ For example, a clip from Nxdia's song "She likes a boy" trended amongst fans of fanon sapphic pairings or pairings with a non-binary character. See: She likes a boy (and I'm not a boy). A short clip from Me, You and Steve trended with characters from various fandoms being put in the three roles. See Me, You and Steve (meme).
  2. ^ Such as contrasting dialogue spoken by Nicholas Galitzine in his roles in the Red, White & Royal Blue film and the film Bottoms.
  3. ^ For example, text originally from a Reddit post about heating water for tea being used with the Spiderverse characters.
  4. ^ A small sample of examples are: hazel_, ileikbees, dean, Cciv, greysyourdm
  5. ^ "Sam Biddle, Paulo Victor Ribeiro, Tatiana Dias, 'Invisible Censorship: TikTok Told Moderators to Suppress Posts by "Ugly" People and the Poor to Attract New Users', The Intercept, March 16 2020". Archived from the original on 2016-03-16.
  6. ^ "Emily Baker-White, 'TikTok's Secret 'Heating' Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral', Forbes, 20 January 2023". Archived from the original on 2023-02-01.
  7. ^ Censorship by TikTok, Wikipedia.
  8. ^ "Dave Jorgenson, 'The Washington Post tried to get suppressed on TikTok. Here's what happened.', The Washington Post, October 28 2022". Archived from the original on 2022-10-29.
  9. ^ "Taylor Lorenz, 'Internet 'algospeak' is changing our language in real time, from 'nip nops' to 'le dollar bean, The Washington Post, April 8 2022". Archived from the original on 2022-04-08.
  10. ^ "gurggggleburgle Tumblr Post". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  11. ^ "cometh-into-the-abyss Tumblr Post,". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  12. ^ "'Thank you SO much', Tumblr post/". Archived from the original on 2024-01-07.
  13. ^ "Lee Raine and Janna Anderson, 'Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age', Pew Research Center, 8 February 2017". Archived from the original on 2024-01-16.
  14. ^ "Alex Hern, 'How TikTok's algorithm made it a success: 'It pushes the boundaries, The Guardian, October 24 2022". Archived from the original on 2022-10-24.
  15. ^ "Sara Morrison, 'TikTok won't stop serving me horror and death', Vox, 26 October 2022". Archived from the original on 2022-10-27.
  16. ^ "Eleanor Cummins, 'The Creepy TikTok Algorithm Doesn't Know You', Wired, 3 January 2022". Archived from the original on 2022-01-03.
  17. ^ "tinypotatodim Tweet". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  18. ^ "SHSLRuby Tweet, September 2022". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  19. ^ "seeing a lot of discussion about whether ao3 should have an algorithm, theslowesthnery". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  20. ^ "Tumblr posts from olderthannetfic and laikaflash". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  21. ^ "fuckofffanpol tumblr post, January 2024". Archived from the original on 2024-01-27.
  22. ^ Does the Wayback Machine actually archive Youtube pages with playable videos?
  23. ^ Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo Songs Vanish from TikTok as Licensing Battle With Universal Music Heats Up by Nancy Dillon and Ethan Millman, Rolling Stone, published 1 February 2024. (Accessed 2 February 2024).
  24. ^ Stranger Things fans on TikTok are being told they’re ruining the show for cosplaying - The Tab. September 2, 2022. (Accessed November 6, 2023)
  25. ^ Stranger Things fans are being ridiculed over their Eddie Munson posts - Popbuzz. September 1, 2022. (Accessed November 6, 2023)
  26. ^ That Viral Dance From Netflix Hit 'Wednesday' Is Taking Over TikTok - CNET, December 15, 2022. (Accessed November 6, 2023)
  27. ^ Can ‘Wednesday’ Replace The Coming Void Left By ‘Stranger Things’ On Netflix? - Forbes. January 8, 2023. (Accessed November 6, 2023).
  28. ^ klopptimus-prime post at Reddit. December 20, 2022. (Accessed November 6, 2023)
  29. ^ How the TikTok effect is taking women’s sport fandom to the next level - Sports Pro Media. July 12, 2023. (Accessed November 6, 2023)
Retrieved from "https://fanlore.org/w/index.php?title=TikTok&oldid=2590298"