The Politics and Evolution of Tiktok as Platform Tool

A fast-growing international success, ByteDance’s short video platform TikTok is a relevant case study to examine how digital platforms expand infrastructurally and accumulate power. TikTok has achieved popularity comparable to major players, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It now grapples with balancing the diverse interests of its different user groups, chief among which content creators. We interrogate how TikTok manages this challenge via an exploratory study that studies the platform’s evolution through what we dub ‘platform tools,’ or, the software-based instruments for cultural production on social media platforms. Such software-based tools have been previously theorized using the ‘boundary resources’ framework, which emerged from information systems studies. This framework conceptualizes platform tools as interrelated, contextual, and dynamic, changing in response to variables internal and external to the platform ecosystem. Recognizing that platform tools are ever-changing, we conduct a ‘platform historiography’ to periodize three main trends: platform tools (1) have contributed to the formalization and professionalization of platform content; (2) have encouraged the standardization of platform-dependent cultural production; and (3) have furthered the platformization of TikTok both within, as well as outside the cultural industries. Our paper serves as a response to calls from media scholars to view platforms as contingent and ever-evolving, and to further social media historiography. More specifically, we contribute to the literature on platform studies because it focuses on an understudied aspect of platform governance: platform tools.