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Abstract
TikTok is the fastest-growing application today, attracting a huge audience of 1.5 billion active users, mostly children and teenagers. Recently, the growing presence of extremist’s groups on social media platforms became more prominent and massive. Yet, while most of the scholarly attention focused on leading platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, the extremist immigration to other platforms like TikTok went unnoticed. This study is a first attempt to find the Far-right’s use of TikTok: it is a descriptive analysis based on a systematic content analysis of TikTok videos, posted in early 2020. Our findings reveal the disturbing presence of Far-right extremism in videos, commentary, symbols and pictures included in TikTok’s postings. While similar concerns were with regard to other social platforms, TikTok has unique features to make it more troublesome. First, unlike all other social media TikTok’ s users are almost all young children, who are more naïve and gullible when it comes to malicious contents. Second, TikTok is the youngest platform thus severely lagging behind its rivals, who have had more time to grapple with how to protect their users from disturbing and harmful contents. Yet, TikTok should have learned from these other platforms’ experiences and apply TikTok’s own Terms of Service that does not allow postings that are deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, or are intended to harass, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset people or include threats of physical violence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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2 Institute for Economics & Peace, “Global Terrorism Index 2019: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism,” (Sydney, 2019), http://visionofhumanity.org/app/uploads/2019/11/GTI-2019web.pdf (accessed 15 May 2020).
3 Institute for Economics & Peace, “Global Terrorism Index 2018: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism” (Sydney, 2018), http://visionofhumanity.org/app/uploads/2018/12/Global-Terrorism-Index-2018-1.pdf (accessed 15 May 2020).
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21 William Feuer, “TikTok Removes Two Dozen Accounts Used for ISIS Propaganda,” CNBC, 21 October 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/21/tiktok-removes-two-dozen-accounts-used-for-isis-propaganda.html (accessed 15 May 2020).
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24 Joseph Cox, “TikTok Has a Nazi Problem,” Motherboard, 18 December 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yw74gy/tiktok-neo-nazis-white-supremacy (accessed 15 May 2020).
25 The list of extremists groups was based on lists collected by the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center), published at https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/groups, the extremist groups included in the Europe's Right Wing: A Nation-by-Nation Guide to Political Parties and Extremist Groups published at http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2085728,00.html the START's Proles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) at https://www.start.umd.edu/profiles-individual-radicalization-united-states-pirus-keshif, database and the list of CEP (Counter Extremism Project), published at https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/supremacy_landing_files/U.S.%20White%20Supremacy%20Groups_022620.pdf
26 “TikTok – Make Your Day, App Store,” https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id835599320 (accessed 15 May 2020).
27 Craig Chapple, “TikTok Crosses 2 Billion Downloads After Best Quarter For Any App Ever.”
28 TikTok Terms of Service, last modified February 2019, https://www.tiktok.com/legal/terms-of-use?lang=en (accessed 15 May 2020).