Authentic over Accurate:

Understanding the Ecology of Climate Protest, Policy and Disaster on TikTok and Implications for News and Education Organizations

Ongoing thesis project, expected completion in Fall 2023

Project supervisors: Dr. Shane Gunster & Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi

Context

Research into TikTok is novel. At the time of this writing in August 2022, searching “TikTok” in Google Scholar returns 68,000 results, whereas searching “Instagram” returns 2.6 million results. Much of the existing research is focused on public health awareness, probably resulting from TikTok’s surge in popularity synchronous with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading it to become the most-trafficked site of 2021 (Tomé & Cardita, 2021). Publications from the field of media studies make up a small fraction of this corpus, and quality environmental communication TikTok papers can be counted on one hand. Previous scholarship in visual and social communication on other SNS platforms should be considered, if only cautiously, as the designed affordances and structures of each network contribute to vastly different user experiences and social uses (Pearce et al., 2018). TikTok’s features and limitations set physical boundaries on the type of content supported, while its communities of users continuously produce shared “grammars of communication” within these borders (Pearce et al., 2018, p. 257)—the unofficial rhetorics, humour, and lingo of the platform (Bruns & Burgess, 2011). This process is a continuous negotiation between the users and the platform, leading to the development of platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015). Research on TikTok’s unique structures and vernaculars is overdue. 

TikTok launched worldwide after merging with lip-sync social network Musical.ly (Jennings, 2019). Having its roots in the popular activity of pretending one can sing like Beyonce or BTS, imitation and replication are at the network’s core. Mimesis, meaning imitation, is encouraged through several design choices. The duet and stitch editing features allow users to import existing TikToks into their videos. TikTok labels the visual effects, filters and music that appear in videos so that they can be used again by inspired viewers. Furthermore, because the video capture and editing process happens entirely within the TikTok app (no additional hardware, apps or software required), everyone has access to the same tools, presets and filters. The welcoming of mimetic behaviour on TikTok contributes to what Zulli & Zulli (2022) call ‘imitation publics’, a refashioning of the term ‘networked publics’ that was used to describe populations restructured by social network technologies (boyd, 2010). Imitation publics are micro-genres wherein content-producing users continuously imitate each other, iteratively introducing new memes and sparking new trends—for example, “BookTok” for discussion about books (Jerasa & Boffone, 2021), “RugTok” for people interested in rugs (Pellot, 2020), and “WitchTok” for those interested in witchcraft (Moniuszko, 2021). The visual vernacular works to reinforce memises and vice versa. Now, set amidst the worsening climate crisis, a set of influencers have risen to spread climate news, offer advice on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint, and get active in climate politics, among other tactics. Previous studies have noted TikTok’s propensity for stoking climate anxiety, rather than outright mis/disinformation (Hautea et al., 2021). Legacy news sources, research organizations and other climate leaders have thrown hats into the ring, but preliminary qualitative analysis illustrates their content badly clashing with the visual vernacular or ignoring the platform’s imitation publics, resulting in low engagement.


Project Goals and Preliminary Results

This project seeks to understand the ecology of climate communication on TikTok. Where are areas of malinformation present? Can we map areas of “polluted” information, as Phillips & Milner (2021) call it? In this analogy, if climate disinformation were toxic gas, climate anxiety might be considered only smog—it won’t kill you, but exposure for an extended duration might have lasting health effects. Climate TikTok was intially known for its perpetuation of climate anxiety (Hautea et al., 2021), but after interviewing climate influencers as part of this project, it appears that a sense of climate care has become more popular. While TikTok appears to have adequately suppressed climate disinformation on their site, the presence of credentialed sources (such as legacy news) is severely lacking. The media site is not the reverberating chamber of climate anxiety it once was, however, the architecture of the platform nonetheless still encourages well-intentioned but uninformed content. With few exceptions, words of advice are overwhelmingly individualized (Maniates, 2001)—that is, based on suggesting minor ineffectual lifestyle changes rather than systemic changes. The almost site-wide prohibition of hyperlinks aside prevents content creators from citing sources and linking to outside information, creating a homogeny of climate content that appear to all be set on equal footing—perhaps conditioning media illiteracy.  


Research Questions

The project explores the following research questions:

RQ1: TikTok Temperature Check: What actors are producing environmental content on TikTok, and what formal and affective elements do they utilize in their content? What is the relative presence of potentially problematic information?

RQ2: How are legacy news sources, official environmental organizations, and other reliable sources of environmental information adapting to the platform?

RQ3: To what extent do the architectural affordances and platform vernaculars of TikTok allow for effective environmental communication? 


Methods

To examine these research questions, I am using the following methods:

  • Interviewing environmental influencers who use TikTok (a total of 5 interviews)

  • Multimodal analysis composed of:

    • Qualitative formal analysis of visual vernaculars and “polluted” information

    • Visual content analysis with intercoder reliability


Data Collection

A TikTok scraper was utilized to scrape the most popular TikTok videos from three major climate events of the past two years: the 2021 record-breaking Pacific Northwest Heatwave, the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States in Fall 2022, and the #Soupgate protest in which members of JustStopOil threw soup at a painting hung in a museum in late 2022. TikAPI and a custom Python code were used to collect a total of about 2000 videos, of which 511 were relevant.


Progress Update

As of March 2023, I am well into the data analysis and writing phase and anticipate finishing the thesis in Fall 2023. I will present the early findings of this research at the International Communication Association 2023 conference in Toronto, Canada in “Research Escalator” compressed format.