Dynamics of Appropriation, Resistance, and Representation in the Black TikTok Strike

  • Unique Paper ID: 161309
  • PageNo: 354-359
  • Abstract:
  • Recently, African American content creators, specifically dancers, have reported facing marginalisation on online content creation platforms. They alleged that their original content has repeatedly been receiving significantly fewer views compared to those who merely copied their content. The creators who copied have largely been Caucasian, giving rise to accusations of racism not only towards the content creation community but also towards the algorithm of these platforms. As a result, African American creators carried out a virtual strike whereby they refused to choreograph dance moves for new music track releases. The strike brought forward a discourse of disproportionate visibility and popularity under ‘digital colonisation’, shedding light on how appropriation takes place in the content creation field. This paper shall focus exclusively on how the marginalisation of Black content creators as contended by them has taken place as well as their resultant resistance as it occurred within the TikTok community.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{161309,
        author = {Saad Ahmed Shaikh and Dr Munira Lokhandwala},
        title = {Dynamics of Appropriation, Resistance, and Representation in the Black TikTok Strike},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {},
        volume = {10},
        number = {3},
        pages = {354-359},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=161309},
        abstract = {Recently, African American content creators, specifically dancers, have reported facing marginalisation on online content creation platforms. They alleged that their original content has repeatedly been receiving significantly fewer views compared to those who merely copied their content. The creators who copied have largely been Caucasian, giving rise to accusations of racism not only towards the content creation community but also towards the algorithm of these platforms. As a result, African American creators carried out a virtual strike whereby they refused to choreograph dance moves for new music track releases. The strike brought forward a discourse of disproportionate visibility and popularity under ‘digital colonisation’, shedding light on how appropriation takes place in the content creation field.
This paper shall focus exclusively on how the marginalisation of Black content creators as contended by them has taken place as well as their resultant resistance as it occurred within the TikTok community.
},
        keywords = {},
        month = {},
        }

Cite This Article

Shaikh, S. A., & Lokhandwala, D. M. (). Dynamics of Appropriation, Resistance, and Representation in the Black TikTok Strike. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 10(3), 354–359.

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