Editorial: From memes to movements: how affordances shape resistance and collective action on TikTok

The platformization of resistance has transitioned from a niche digital phenomenon to a defining feature of contemporary political mobilization (Jalli, 2025;Vrikki & Lekakis, 2023).It describes coordinated, multi-voiced forms of dissent that rely on digital platforms, such as TikTok, X, Telegram, and Instagram, as core infrastructure for visibility, coordination, and narrative-building (Baden et al., 2025). Rather than emerging through formal organizations or centralized leadership, many contemporary movements operate through connective action: personalized, individualized expressions that scale through platform logics such as algorithmic amplification, hashtag indexing, and participatory remixing (Kobilke & Markiewitz, 2024). Recent movements illustrate this dynamic across diverse political contexts. Nigerian youth broadcast their struggle against police brutality to global audiences under #EndSARS (George & Lilleker, 2025), while women in Iran sustained the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' uprising despite internet shutdowns by circulating protest content across digital networks (Mehan, 2024). In Hong Kong, a leaderless protest swarm leveraged Telegram, AirDrop, and mesh networks to coordinate collective action while evading authoritarian surveillance (Ting, 2020). More recently, Kenya's Gen Z mobilized on TikTok and X, culminating in the storming of parliament and sustained pressure that led the president to withdraw a widely contested finance bill (Mariita, 2025).Crucially, platformized resistance evolves dialectically alongside the technological architectures that both enable and constrain it. To grasp contemporary online activism, we must therefore account for how successive digital infrastructures have shaped the boundaries of user agency. During the era of 'Internet 1.0,' resistance was largely information-centered: users leveraged decentralized access and hyperlinking to circulate alternative narratives, bypass censorship, and circumvent centralized gatekeeping (Bambauer, 2013). With the rise of social media and the transition into 'Internet 2.0,' the dominant affordance shifted from access to connectivity. Platforms enabled users to build expansive networks, coordinate in real time, and mobilize rapid collective action through viral campaigns and hashtag activism (Gerbaudo, 2017). Yet these possibilities were never uniform (Tufekci, 2017, p. 55). Each platform's interface design, communicative norms, and technocultural conventions shaped distinct forms of self-presentation, gratifications, and interaction, producing differentiated environments for political expression and collective action (Avdeeff, 2021;Leiner et al., 2018). In what is often described as 'Internet 3.0,' however, the digital landscape has become increasingly governed by algorithmic curation, artificial intelligence, and opaque regimes of moderation and platform governance (Zahoor et al., 2025). Visibility is no longer primarily a function of network size or virality, but of algorithmic ranking systems, recommendation engines, and platform-defined metrics of relevance. Consequently, resistance becomes increasingly oriented toward managing legibility within computational systems through tactics such as evasion, recoding, memetic disguise, and strategic adaptation to platform logics in order to remain visible and shareable. Under these conditions, resistance is not only expressive and collective, but also infrastructural and technical: a struggle over what can be seen, circulated, amplified, and sustained within algorithmically governed environments.TikTok, the focal platform of this special issue, exemplifies the paradigm often associated with Internet 3.0 and represents a marked departure from earlier social networking models. As a post-social media platform, TikTok is organized around algorithmically curated short-form audiovisual content, shifting attention away from stable followership and enduring interpersonal networks (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). Rather than foregrounding social ties, TikTok cultivates an engagement ecology defined by transient and affective content (Fang et al., 2019), in which algorithmic recommendation systems largely determine what becomes visible and what remains obscure (Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2022). Central to this structure is TikTok's 'For You Page', which curates personalized content streams that are often detached from creator-follower relationships, effectively diminishing much of the 'social' dimension traditionally associated with social media (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). This form of "content without context" (p. 7) accelerates the reenactment, reinterpretation, and viral circulation of audiovisual material, privileging participation through replication and transformation rather than sustained dialogue.Accordingly, scholars conceptualize TikTok's networked publics as "imitation publics" (Zulli & Zulli, 2020), "remixing culture[s]" (Lacasa, 2020), or "affective audio networks" (Primig et al., 2023), where political and emotional expression is mediated through mimesis, rhythm, and sound-based editing practices. TikTok's distinctive affordances generate a deeply ambivalent environment for political expression and resistance. On the one hand, the platform enables what Avdeeff (2021) describes as a "largely democratic environment… allowing for forms of resistance to dominant/hegemonic conventions" (p. 91), reshaping how users engage with power, persuasion, and identity (e.g., Ionescu & Licu, 2023;Le Compte & Klug, 2021;Primig et al., 2023). The platform supports accessible modes of digital self-expression that can be simultaneously subversive and normative, equipping users with tools to stage dissent through humor, affect, performance, and aesthetic experimentation. Such dissent frequently operates through subtle semiotic strategies: the repurposing of viral sounds (Primig et al., 2023), the strategic circulation of memes, or the playful remixing of platform vernaculars to critique authority, institutional violence, and hegemonic discourse (Cervi & Divon, 2023). Crucially, such political discourse does not merely disseminate information; it actively structures affective orientations toward political actors and institutions, consolidating collective identities, interpretative repertoires, and emotional alignments within divergent communities (Kobilke et al., 2023).On the other hand, TikTok's design also reproduces normative ideals around authenticity (Barta & Andalibi, 2021), beauty (Seekis & Lawrence, 2023), gender (Frejsjö & Wernersson Birgersson, 2023), and race (Civila & Jaramillo-Dent, 2022). Algorithmic amplification frequently privileges content that aligns with dominant socio-political norms or prevailing viral trends (Burgess et al., 2017;Pruccoli et al., 2022). Driven by commercial imperatives, recommendation systems and content moderation practices regulate which forms of resistance gain visibility and which are marginalized or suppressed (Weiß et al., 2025). This dynamic is particularly evident in keyword censorship and the moderation of politically sensitive material, including content related to LGBTQ+ rights (Monea, 2023).While TikTok enables rapid mobilization and the viral diffusion of social movements, such visibility does not automatically translate into sustained political change. The speed and fluidity of platform-based mobilization can generate what Tufekci (2017, pp. 71-77) describes as tactical freeze, whereby movements become locked into their initial expressive repertoires and struggle to evolve strategically beyond the moment of virality, particularly when attempting to transition into sustained offline organizing (see also Kandu, 2025). Moreover, the absence of centralized leadership and formalized decisionmaking structures can constrain movements' capacity for internal coordination, strategic negotiation, and effective engagement with institutional actors (Tufekci, 2017, pp. 78-79).Consequently, the low barriers to entry that facilitate the rapid emergence of online movements do not necessarily produce the durable organizational infrastructures required to challenge entrenched power structures. Simultaneously, the same platform affordances that enable emotionally resonant and participatory activism also facilitate counter-mobilization and coordinated backlash. Activists must therefore contend with misinformation, harassment, and organized cyber-troop interventions aimed at destabilizing their narratives and eroding public support (Nugroho, 2025).Resistance on TikTok is therefore shaped by continuous negotiation: users must strategically harness the platform's affordances to sustain visibility and translate online momentum into offline organizing, while simultaneously deploying evasive tactics to navigate its opaque and shifting algorithmic governance. This special issue is dedicated to unpacking this tension, offering both theoretical and empirical analyses of how TikTok's distinctive socio-technical architecture structures the possibilities, limits, and trajectories of contemporary collective action and resistance: Within this framework, Karine Ehn explores the limits of digital solidarity in her paper, 'Amplified Selves, Elusive Collectives: The Paradox of Digital Nomadism on TikTok'. Ehn argues that TikTok's design systematically prioritizes content that is optimized for individual, aspirational self-presentation and peer resonance, effectively fragmenting collective identity into commodified lifestyle performances. By demonstrating how the platform's memetic infrastructure amplifies episodic content that satisfies personal recognition while sidelining complex narratives of systemic struggle, Ehn's work illustrates how TikTok's capacity to build a shared, visible identity simultaneously undermines the conditions necessary for sustained, politically coherent collective mobilization.Building upon this concept of fragmented collectives, Andreas Schellewald's 'Changing Modes of Public Connection' investigates the For You Page as an environment structured around disconnected sociability. Schellewald posits that because TikTok is structurally designed to capture uncommitted, ephemeral attention rather than to foster durable social networking, traditional forms of social movement organizing are fundamentally incompatible with the platform's architecture. Consequently, he argues that political action on the platform often bypasses coordinated mobilization, manifesting instead as infrapolitical resistance: tactical, embodied interruptions and acts of care that temporarily disrupt the immersive continuity of the algorithmic flow from the bottom up. Finally, the precarious intersection of identity, visibility, and algorithmic harm is examined in "Jewish Entrepreneurial Labor TikTok" by Tom Divon, Gabrielle D. Beacken, Jess Rauchberg, and Jessica Maddox. The authors detail how ethnoreligious creators must engage in complex entrepreneurial labor to navigate a platform that both demands their visibility and exposes them to a 'religious panopticon' of surveillance and algorithmic antisemitism. By highlighting the absolute necessity of evasion tactics, such as using coded language or 'algospeak', to bypass biased moderation systems that penalize educational counter-speech while allowing hate to circulate freely, this study serves as a stark reminder of how marginalized groups must continuously hack and distort a platform's affordances simply to survive its hostile governance.