TikTok MediaLit Campaign Research
Does the TikTok-initiated media literacy campaign sound lame to youth?
To better understand youth attitudes towards media literacy education on social media, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in such initiatives, we conducted a large-scale qualitative content analysis of user responses to a recent media literacy educational campaign on TikTok.
People
Collaboration with Dr. Ioana Literat and TikTok
Media & Social Change Lab (MASCLab) is a hub for multimodal and digital scholarship at Teachers College, Columbia University that explores the relationship between media and social change.
Goals
How do users respond to a platform-initiated media literacy education campaign on youth-oriented social media?
What lessons can we draw from these responses in terms of targeted media literacy education initiatives for youth?
Method
While there is broad societal consensus about the urgency and significance of media literacy education, especially for young people, we still lack a grounded, bottom-up understanding of youth attitudes towards such initiatives. Moreover, trying to capture these attitudes through self-report methods like surveys or interviews runs the risk of producing biased results, due to social desirability effects.
This study relied on the qualitative content analysis of 11,449 public comments posted in response to five videos published by an official TikTok account. Created by TikTok US, five videos were part of a strategic media literacy campaign designed to highlight—via the use of humorous narratives acted out by TikTok microcelebrities—skills like fact-checking, assessing the credibility of information and visuals, understanding bias, and distinguishing facts from opinions. The videos were very similar in terms of their comedic approach and aesthetics, making for a congruent campaign. They were extremely popular on the platform, accumulating a total of 53.8m views, 1.63m likes, and 11k shares; at the same time, it is worth noting that the high view count was likely boosted by their being disseminated from an official TikTok account and pushed onto users’ For You Pages.
The data corpus was analyzed qualitatively, using a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) in order to identify patterns and nuance in the data. Four researchers participated in the qualitative coding process. The first analytical step involved identifying comments that were related to the content and/or educational aims of the videos and were thus relevant to understanding youth responses to this media literacy initiative. These comments were labeled with simple codes (e.g., “positive,” “confused,” “sarcastic,” “comparison with school,” “comparison with other social media,” “political,” etc.) that facilitated a birds-eye understanding of the data corpus. Then, in the second round of analysis, we read the comments again and identified subthemes in the data; finally, these subthemes were further synthesized and coalesced into the key findings presented above.
Impact
Collaboration Impact
Realize academic research can also serve as a kind of UXR and Tiktok had become a strategic partner with our research team
Product Design Impact
TikTok can increase transparency in communicating how decisions are made regarding user reports of misinformation or content violations
Participatory activities or more community-oriented designs allow participants to enact their identities, providing valuable insight into the characteristics, perceptions, and expectations of the target population
Highly political nature of user responses should be expected
Reflection
Need to work within the tight research timeline set up by the technology industry giant corporate
Acknowledge the difficulties in objectively and definitively detecting sarcasm online and the inescapable subjectivity inherent in this thematic analysis process
Convince stakeholders with findings that academic research can act as UXR to help improving product or marketing campaign design
Publication
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Tiktok and Media and Social Change Lab.