You really cannot make a claim about TikTok's content distribution based on your own feed. TikTok's feed is extremely hyper-targeted for each individual.
Isn't that the point? You can't say that tiktok "gets rid of people" in those demographics when Tiktok's algo creates all these micro communities where they flourish.
I've never seen more diversity and representation on social media than on Tiktok.
Sure, it "gets rid of people" by isolating them into bubbles and makes sure people who don't want to see it, well, won't see it. Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
I think it's a big question, and one that applies to most social media, even if TikTok is one of the most extreme examples. Is it ethically/morally/socially good to de facto isolate niche groups of like-minded people into closed spaces? It feels bad to me, but I've also considered that people are "hard wired" for much smaller groups. Maybe the best way to deal with the scale of social media is to condense it down to small, isolated communities, although I personally prefer to actively choose them myself, rather than being herded by an algorithm into some unlabeled cluster with similar viewing habits.
>Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
Why is that objectionable? It's not like people don't know about queer or trans people and tiktok is shielding them from knowing, people know and just aren't interested. Forcing people to watch things they aren't interested in only makes them resentful and fed up with them, instead of simply uninterested. Interest can't be demanded.
I don't think it's objectionable, I just think it's relevant to the discussion. I think most people use the word "representation" to mean a topic or idea being seen/floated within a larger audience, e.g. "representation" is having <x> actor in a Hollywood blockbuster (for the purpose of, say, exposing more people to a positive image of <x>). This doesn't seem like representation to me.
That said, if the goal of representation is just to provide more media/content for people who like <x>, then yes, this is representation. That's not how I think of the word, but words don't have concrete meanings in the real world.
No, quite honestly I think they are stupid (and was called a homophobe for that once).
Having minority characters in itself is perfectly okay, overcompensating in the other direction and flooding people's media with people that barely make up 10% of the population in a misguided attempt to "promote tolerance" is bizarre.
Coupled with the fact that supporters of this idea all seem to share a very moralistic attitude and jump at the opportunity to call any critic the most extreme names they can come up with, that makes the idea pretty weak in my eyes.
> Is it "representation" if it's only seen by people who want to see it?
Yes. Definitely. The representation matters most to the people in that bubble. I just think about how great it would have been to see more queer media when was growing up.
Okay, that's fair. It's a different kind of representation than what I was thinking of, though, meaning general exposure of an idea to some kind of broader audience.
From an individual's perspective, being in a bubble is great. I get it. I just get a little anxiety at the idea of society being partitioned into a bunch of self-reaffirming bubbles of different extremes, something that's starting to feel very real in the US lately.
