The broadcasting trap: TikTok and the “democratization” of digital content production

Social media and digital production tools have provided a big impulse to the possibility of a democratization of content production. However, enhanced viability does not imply an actual capacity to tap into the opportunity. Research on social media participation shows that content production, and especially the most popular content, is mostly driven by a small elite of super-users, and an additional but still small share of content creators. In this paper, we wonder whether a more recent social media such as TikTok, whose design features are optimized to facilitate content production and to enhance visibility of content from unknown users, actually makes a difference in this regard. To do so, we analyzed the production and networking patterns observed on a large database of 24,992,678 videos posted by 6,973,120 unique users on TikTok between October 2014 and December 2019. We find that in TikTok, the implicit operational logic is that of broadcasting. To spark a real democratization in digital content production, it is necessary to overcome this model and to embrace more radical forms of production and distribution, most notably intrinsically collective forms of online creation. Insofar as content production reflects a broadcasting logic, no targeted changes in the design features are likely to substantially affect the patterns of active participation in social media such as TikTok.