TikTok

Website
Name:	TikTok
Owner/Maintainer:	ByteDance
Dates:	2017 – present
Type:	Social network
Fandom:	Multifandom
URL:	TikTok
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TikTok is a short-form video social media platform where users can posts videos and photo slideshows up to 10 minutes long, owned by Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok was originally released in China as Douyin in September 2016 and released globally as TikTok in September 2017, merging with popular video platform Musical.ly in October 2017. Since its release, it has become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, and is used by fans in a variety of ways, hosting video edits, meta, memes, cosplay and other fannish activities.

In particular, TikTok has been embraced as a platform for fandom by younger fans. As a result of the format and unique features of TikTok's platform, such as its algorithm and licensed music library, many of the app's conventions and the types of fan activities and fanworks it hosts are idiosyncratic and differ from those on other social media platforms such as Tumblr. However, TikTok has also been criticised by some fans, such as for its censorship.

Fandoms on TikTok

Many newly released TV shows, movies and games become popular on TikTok as fans share clips from the canon, and inspiring edits, memes and discussion. This in turn often drives interest in recent canons. However, it is not just newer fandoms that have big TikTok fandom presences, and TikTok often prompts waves of new interest in older fandoms; for example, the Marauders fandom has a large TikTok fandom. There have also some films or TV shows which develop a small fandom on TikTok, based around edits, which have relatively little presence in other fan spaces; for example, the dramatised biography, Temple Grandin, had a number of edits made of it in 2024 which received a lot of responses and engagement, however it has very few fanworks in any other spaces.

Marketing to Fandom on TikTok

As a result of the viral potential of TikTok, the powers that be have embraced the platform for marketing of new canons.

In another case, a dance scene from the fourth episode of the TV series Wednesday went viral following its release; this scene inspired a TikTok trend in which fans would recreate the dance. Some fans felt that marketing for the series had been designed with a potential TikTok audience in mind:

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 

Many authors also intentionally market new books to BookTok. This type of marketing has in some cases backfired, such as in the case of the Seattle Kraken NHL team encouraging engagement from "hockey BookTok" on their account, which lead to a player and his partner being sexually harassed by fans on TikTok and other platforms.

TikTok as Platform for Source Canon

As well as being a platform for fan activity in a variety of fandoms, TikTok creators, videos and series have themselves become source canons for new fandoms.

Web Series

Some creators on TikTok, after starting out with skits or one-off videos, began to develop their videos into longer term web series, 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.
• Bistro Huddy - A series set at a fictional restaurant, focused on the staff team.

Fan Activities

Fans use TikTok for a wide variety of fan activity, from posting fanworks like video edits, animations, animatics and fanart speedpaints, sharing cosplays, creating meta, memes, and slideshows, as well as reccing fanfiction. Originally, TikTok allowed users to post videos under 60 seconds long, similar to the discontinued service Vine. As its popularity has grown, TikTok has extended videos to up to 10 minutes, and introduced slideshows, a scrollable collection of photos (similar to a multi-photo Instagram post) set to audio, allowing fans to post a much wider variety of content.

One feature of TikTok is the ability for users to use audio from another video or from TikTok's licensed music library on their own TikToks, allowing for the widespread sharing of audios and the creation of trends, particularly in edits, memes and slideshows. TikTok trends tend to last for a short amount of time — often only a few weeks — with hundreds or thousands of users create different visuals, ranging from art work to cosplay to clips from shows or movies, to go with the same audio track. Often, trending audio tracks are short clips from a song, prompting many musical artists to tease new music on the platform to build interest prior to its release; for example, Hozier released a clip of his song Too Sweet on TikTok a week prior to releasing the full EP, leading to the song trending in both fannish and non-fannish TikTok communities, including a video edit trend. In other cases, audios will be pieces of dialogue from a show, film or other piece of media, often leads to fandom audios breaking containment and trending outside fannish TikTok. Audios from other TikTok videos or audio versions of text posts from places like Reddit and Tumblr are also regularly used in meme trends.

Meta and Discussion

A number of TikTokers post videos focused on fandom topics, where they might discuss fandom culture, events and drama, explain fannish terminology and concepts and join in trends but make them linked to fandom. For example, dicklessthewonderclown gained popularity on TikTok for posting videos about the Omegaverse, as did Icaruspendragon, who also posts about Supernatural. Other fans discuss stats or academia and how it relates to fandom spaces.

Meta on TikTok can be very different from meta on other platforms. As TikTok is a short video platform the meta also tends to be short and informal from the video format. Unlike written meta, which is inherently written and scripted meta, on TikTok meta is often unscripted, adding to the informality. Given TikTok’s time limits on videos, much meta is split up into multiple videos or “parts” unlike longer platforms such as Tumblr.

Another aspect of TikTok and meta is the use of replying to comments with a video; while similar to Tumblr asks, it differs in that any comment can be responded to, not just the ones sent to a blog’s ask box.

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. See: 2024 Harry Potter Fanbinding Controversy for one example.

Fan Edits

Main article: Edit (video genre)

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. If a fan edit or a particular trend becomes popular, other creators will make resources to accompany these trends such as clip or scene packs, or text overlays so that stylised lyrics can be used in edits. Creators will use either the built-in edit features of TikTok or third-party tools, with CapCut being a particularly popular one. Due to the short length of edits and these tools, some fans have found it reduces barriers to creating video-based fanworks as learning to use more complicated video editing software isn't a necessity, many of the resources can be found in TikTok, and if someone wants to focus on a character with few scenes or just make something short, they don't struggle to fill a 3+ minute video.

TikTok edits often consist of a series of clips of a character, edited in time to the beat or rhythm of a song and often looped two or three times over. 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.

Slideshows

Slideshows are their own form of fanwork on TikTok, taking the form of images or collages in a particular order and intended to be scrolled through in time to the audio. Like with edits, there are often slideshow trends based around a particular theme or audio, such as You could live a hundred lifetimes and never deserve that boy and She likes a boy (and I'm not a boy). Other fannish slideshow trends like Maybe in another universe are used both in serious slideshows and as a meme format.

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

Other Fan Use

Fans use TikTok as a platform to share fannish memes. Often these relate to particular fandoms, or fandom websites such as AO3. The meme If there's a screen, AO3 will be seen is an example of a fannish meme popular on TikTok.

"[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.

Fan Discussion and Commentary

Generally, fan discussion around TikTok as a platform has centred around its differences in demographics and features to other social media platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter, and the ways this has influenced how fans engage with fandom. In particular, TikTok and fans who use it have been heavily criticised by some fans for bringing behaviours learned from TikTok to other platforms, and for violating fandom etiquette.

Differences to Other Social Media Platforms

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 or heats up 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, typically those about political topics or involving the oppression of marginalised people, the occurrence of censorship and suppression on other videos is less clear. 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'.

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 

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 

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. 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, 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. 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, which causes its own issues. 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 or have expressed frustrations over the lack of algorithms (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.

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. Other users are misusing tags to try and "get reach", 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.

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.

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

See UMG-TikTok Music Ban and Non-Copyright Music Edit Trend

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, 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.

Fan Work Examples on TikTok

• The Pedro Pascal Edit, a thirst edit by dvcree
• Football Edits, particularly for women's football, have become a popular fan activity on TikTok, especially since 2022

Trends in Vidding

• Maybe in another universe
• You could live a hundred lifetimes and never deserve that boy
• She likes a boy (and I'm not a boy)
• Just a Man
• Le Monde Colors Trend
• Kpop Dance Challenge
• You, Me and Steve (meme)
• Army Dreamers
• Skit (genre)

Fannish Accounts and Creators

• (B)Rad Martin - an author who creates scenes about popular pairing tropes and ship dynamics
• Icaruspendragon - an account run by Berk, a fandom enthusiast who regularly posts videos about Omegaverse and various topics relating to it.
• It's a me, Silvia - a creator who roleplays skits, sometimes in cosplay, for Harry Potter and various other fandoms.
• Das hazel - a creator who often cosplays and creates Star Wars scenes and reviews, as well as commenting on aspects on fandom including fandom culture and etiquette.