This podcast talks about the TikTok strike where black content creators avoid posting dances so that the platform recognizes where a bulk of the community creativity comes from. There is a music and dance culture on TikTok where dances are made and shared when new music comes out. Megan Thee Stallion dropped a new song and without black people to interpret the song into dance, the culture fostered on the TikTok network would stall or die. Of course, social media networks thrive on traffic, and dwindling user activity spells doom for them, so they responded with trying to promote black content creators. I expose some background with online censoring as the fuel that created the sentiment that TikTok did not care for black people and caused the need to prove that they deserve to have a creative outlet that respects them. I go into some details about my research and my thought behind the approach to find insightful results through open discussion and not just through numbers. While this scenario is primarily involving black social media creators, my audience should be relatively open as this is a discussion about the history of the struggle for equality and how it meets the online interface. This allows the audience to expand into the general minority who make use of social media.

Podcast