Social Media Observation #2 TikTok vs. Twitter

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During the Project, I made the decision to focus on and observe the #BlackLivesMatter movement on two different social media platforms. Although the BLM movement was much more active last year I chose to observe the long-term effects social media and its user have on the movement.

The platforms I chose to conduct these observations on were TikTok and Twitter. I chose TikTok because it seems as if this social media platform recently has been skyrocketing in popularity and notoriety highlighting that more users are on TikTok now. Furthermore, I also chose Twitter due to the fact that Twitter's platform prioritizes current issues and what’s going on now, helping me understand and clearly see the effect this platform has on the movement. For example to back this statement up, in the article Facebook and Engineering the Public, the writer Zeynep Tufekci writes about how large corporations’ priority is to make money and hook the user and most social media users don’t realize this (Tufekci). Both platforms have unique ways of conveying and connecting their movements to their users.

Since I the option two to compare two social media outlets, I saw a variety of different perspectives and ideas conveyed in different ways. The idea that the algorithm has all the say in how a certain topic or movement is conveyed is highlighted when writer Zeynep Tufekci in What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: writes “Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now — seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.” (Tufekci). Tufecki is connecting the idea that large corporations’ true motive is money since at first when an issue arises the algorithm begins recognizing an increase in searches/clicks for information in that specific movement and moves it to the top in hopes its users will click and engage more and more. Specifically, in my project, it seemed that TikTok's algorithm used this exact idea because it was pushing out more extreme videos of BLM protests and events resulting in those videos having an incredibly large like and comment count which highlights the corporation’s hidden motive of gaining money through its user and app interaction since the videos had the ability to hook so many users. This idea that extreme videos gain more attention and profit for social media platforms is highlighted in Youtube, the Great Radicalizer when Zeynep Tufekci writes, “It"s algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with -- or to incendiary content in general.”(Tufekci). On the other hand, Twitter had a different approach when conveying the same movement of BLM. Based on what I saw from the posts on Twitter regarding BLM it was clear that Twitter was more focused on presenting the most current information disregarding like and comment count. It seemed Twitter’s main motive in relation to the BLM movement was to create long threads of conversation in hope that the user interested in that specific BLM post will create a small community of users who share the same idea and begin interacting and debating about either the same idea or completely different ones.

This motive that Twitter’s algorithm has embedded although more small community based, also shows again the idea that the main goal of large corporations such as TikTok and Twitter is to make money through user interaction and not work to convey accurate and relevant information to its users in order to create a community of educated users who use the algorithm as a resource, as well as a fun media outlet to connect or even debate. Overall, I learned that social media has great potential and does a good job of staying current however, the information displayed is often displayed in hopes of more money and user interaction rather than educating users with accurate information as an addition to the fun user interaction offered by social media to connect with others.