Summer Research Reports: Meg Everett on Studying Youth on TikTok
BCNM is thrilled to support our students in their summer research. Read about Meg Everett on Studying Youth on TikTok: Challenges of Data Access, Privacy, and Algorithmic Influence!
Dominated by youth and focused on short-form, user-generated content that prizes virality, TikTok has become a potent symbol of social media's penetration into school environments. My summer research aimed to explore the concerns and possibilities that arise from this entangled web of social interactions and their significant overlap with formal schooling environments. While some K-12 schools take advantage of social media platforms, including TikTok, to create official school accounts to share content with their communities (Dennen et al., 2017), the hashtags #schoolaccount and #schoolaccounts reveal a different dynamic. Rather than generating school-sanctioned profiles, this search produced a video catalog with over 40 million combined views. Pilot testing that examined 30 videos associated with these hashtags (from a search that included all videos, unwatched, and recently uploaded) revealed that students co-opt the name of their school to post videos of other students surreptitiously, anonymously, and often without consent. As such, my summer project posed the following question: How do students utilize unofficial TikTok accounts associated with the hashtags #schoolaccount and #schoolaccounts to represent and shape their lived experiences in formal schooling environments?
During the project’s summer phase, I returned to the hashtag #schoolaccount to begin a systematic collection of videos associated with the tag. However, this search returned a “No Results Found,” message, indicating potential guideline violations and restricting access to the content. TikTok’s terms of service limit data access through the TikTok Research Tool, with further restrictions on data from creators under 18. Consequently, the project shifted focus to explore broader issues of social media research methodologies, data privacy, and algorithmic influence. Using #schoolaccount as a case study, the research now seeks to understand how TikTok’s algorithm affects the visibility of school-related content, and the implications for social media use in educational contexts. It also explores the ethical challenges faced by researchers studying youth behavior on social media sites.