A TikTok Walkthrough to Explore Its Use as a Source of Climate Change Information

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.

What role does the TikTok app and platform play in all of this, in terms of the app infrastructure, affordances, and affect? This project conducted an app walkthrough, engaging with the TikTok app like a first-time user and observing the experience of doing so. Notably, TikTok’s newsroom contains quite a lot of material related to climate change, and the app also recommends non-profit organisations to connect with and host online fund-raising campaigns for.

TikTok also provides a substantial amount of advice on how to identify and avoid mis- and disinformation on the platform, but this does not extend to information on how its algorithm works. There is some detail on what kinds of user actions result in video recommendations on the homepage, but it is difficult to train the algorithm to promote specific types of content to the homepage. Very specific search terms tend to help, but also severely narrow the range of content being shown (often highlighting young, white, American, female climate influencers, which is a highly limited selection).

Further research on this will more directly explore geographic filtering options and affective aspects.