The Use of TikTok in Support of Alexey Navalny

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat, whose interest is in digital protest cultures on TikTok, or in what he calls the overspilt public sphere. TikTok has become considerably more important in recent years, and this has had some interesting consequences; in Russia, for instance, TikTok now limits its content to Russian-made material, and Russian youth are actively seeking to circumvent such restrictions.

The Russian media environment is complicated and hostile, with comprehensive state capture of almost all media outlets and outright censorship of reporting on the Ukraine war. But social media have proved much harder to control: Alexey Navalny’s YouTube channel, for instance, has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, and platforms like Telegram, Twitter, and TikTok are also being used for oppositional content.

Joan’s case study is on the subsequent poisoning of Navalny on a plane trip, focussing on a number of pro-Navalny hashtags in particular; these were used to capture the top TikTok videos addressing the issue. Most of the accounts involved in sharing these are anonymous; others mainly appeared as female, and had messages in support of Navalny in their profiles; there was a mix of protest footage, memetic content, Navalny-supporting content, and others, and this was different from patterns for similar videos on YouTube.

Most videos used music with relevant critical lyrics from Russian bands, while a smaller number used original or manipulated footage. There is thus the possibility that TikTok is building a soundtrack for the Navalny online protests.

Other video themes were making statements against Putin but in support of Russia; there were memes of people spraypainting the name Navalny on the snow in front of their houses as a means of making the authorities clearing the streets; others connected the Navalny case with movie scenes and other popular media. This is political communication bursting into new channels, and the social dynamic of such interactions favours and exploits platform algorithms. The platform was out of reach of Russian regulation at the time, but it is not clear whether this is still the case now; at the time, TikTok provided a free and fearless space for oppositional expression. And a local culture and language is evolving here.