Glitch Politics In Spaces of Digital Care: Resistance to Censorship on Tiktok

Background and Purpose: TikTok has been conceptualized as a space of digital care, where social workers meet the public to provide psychoeducation, words of affirmation, and other kinds of distanced care. The use of social media to provide care digitally can be theorized as a stop-gap measure to meet the need for more mental health services. A critical analysis of this care work, however, is that people use social media to provide care outside of the boundaries of more “legitimate” care infrastructures. Additionally, feminist geographers have introduced the concepts of “glitch epistemologies” and “glitch politics” to understand the acts of resistance communities do digitally to subvert power dynamics and oppressive social systems. Queer social workers of color on TikTok are examples of glitch politics and existing in shadow care infrastructures to support communities of queer people of color digitally. But, what happens to these spaces of digital care when they are suppressed by the state or bought by billionaires with active political agendas aligning with oppressive systems?

Methods: I draw from a larger study of queer social workers of color using TikTok to provide care and from 5 years of digital ethnographic observation on the app. Using constructivist grounded theory methodology, I combined these cultural observations with data from 10 participants in individual in-depth interviews, participatory process groups, and a sample of their TikTok videos. Using an iterative process of coding, constant comparison, and axial coding, the participants and I developed categories of ethical dilemmas and practices.

Results: Censorship included explicit removal of videos from some users which featured trans identity, discussing Palestinian genocide, and discussing Immigration & Customs Enforcement, and suspected suppressing of videos which used words like “trans,” “ICE,” “palestine,” “genocide.” TikTok users, broadly, engage in various practices to get through suspected censors, including mouthing words but not audibly saying them or using them in text, using visual aids like pieces of printed paper with the true message of the video, or using algospeak– the subtle mispronouncing or misspelling words enough so they are understandable by humans but not automated content moderation. Beyond discursive resistance, mutual aid and charitable organizing efforts are also suppressed. Users use subversive methods to continue them, such as using the TikTok shop– an in-app marketplace pushed by advertisers – to fundraise while pretending to advertise a product and asking the audience to join in the ruse.

Conclusions and Implications: These practices to evade suspected censorship reflects operating in spaces of digital care that function as shadow care infrastructure. Many of these practices originated from these spaces and are an example of creative innovation against state-sponsored suppression. There is a need in social work scholarship to engage in digital spaces of collective action, as this paper shows, to learn from how people in marginalized communities develop novel strategies to resist oppression. Spatial conceptualizations of social media are increasingly necessary as it continues to integrate with our physical social environment and grows as a space of care and a part of the shadow care infrastructure.