Is TikTok “for” News? Sociotechnical Frictions and Workarounds in Environmental News Events on TikTok
By examining three distinct environmental news events—a protest, a policy, and a disaster—this article explores how social media companies shape public debate through the design of their platforms. TikTok’s technical infrastructure most readily supports vertical video, disallows timestamps and hyperlinks, and compels participation in algorithmic trends; each of these introduces frictions to conventional journalistic and science communication practices, disadvantaging news content from established sources in particular. Some creators circumvented these technical frictions, with mixed success, occasionally leading to unanticipated negative consequences for the broader news media ecology. This article contributes to the scholarly conceptualization of affordances—not as inflexible walls that delineate use, but as frictions that can be overcome. Finally, this article concludes with practical recommendations for creators and journalists on how to negotiate both TikTok’s entrenched platform vernacular and its restrictive technical affordances.
Ryland Shaw. (2025). Is TikTok “for” News? Sociotechnical Frictions and Workarounds in Environmental News Events on TikTok. International Journal of Communication, 19.