#107: Pinkydoll

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Hi.

You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. My For You Page these days is “power gay” Daniel-Ryan Spaulding getting Botox, Kathleen Hanna singing on a fitness bike, Madeline Argy’s accent, Hannah Diamond promoting her new single, Michael Motamedi eating tin fish in Spain, Glaive wearing Lemaire Black Piped Loafers to the sound of DJ Hearstring’s Boiler Room. How is your summer going? 

Here is your last TikTok update before a little vacation en France…

📼 The Bizarre and the Unknown
🐕 Antisemitic Dog Whistles
🌡️ Class Dynamics and Pakistani TikTok
🏺What else

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📼 The Bizarre and the Unknown

In the last days a TikTok Live video snippet of TikTok/Instagram/OnlyFans creator Pinkydoll was shared widely. In the video Pinkydoll can be seen popping popcorn kernels one at a time with the use of a hair iron while performing a call-and-response, with viewers sending gifts and receiving a corresponding response (Dexerto).

The video left many viewers confused (“what the hell is going on”) while trying to understand Pinkydoll’s repetitive bot like actions and usage of slang. Here is an explanation. TikTok Live lets viewers give virtual gifts (i.e. monetary tokens) to streamers, often in exchange for onscreen shout-outs. Attracting comparisons to gambling, this format has faced criticism for allowing kids to spend hundreds of dollars on parasocial relationships with TikTokers (DailyDot). So in this video, all of Pinkydoll’s reactions—the catchphrases, the licking, the repetitive gestures—are responses to tokens. 

TikTok Live is an entrance door to strange things happening on the internet. And it is dramatically understudied and unexplored by journalists and academics (Know Your Meme). I especially liked Bogna Konior’s take on the video: surreal genius of content girls will save the internet from current senile supremacy of discourse edgelords and edgeladies, critical support to her. 

🐕 Antisemitic Dog Whistles

A dog whistle is coded or suggestive language that is understood by a particular in-group while its meaning(s) remain opaque to the out-group. Dog whistles often build on or reference pre-existing ideological tenets that individuals in the in-group would understand, write Abbie Richards, Robin O'Luanaigh and Lea Marchl for The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) – an academic research initiative: How ‘Gnome Hunting’ Became TikTok’s Latest Antisemitic Dog Whistle. 

Gnome Hunting and Millions Wear the Hats refer to a series of gnomepill and gnomes are real memes and videos on TikTok in which people claim they're hunting for gnomes. The videos were popularized in April 2023. That same month, people began hypothesizing that the term "gnome" is used as a Nazi dog whistle in the videos to refer to Jewish people, with some examples including the phrase "millions wear the hats," a purported reference to the alt-right catchphrase "billions must die." (Know Your Meme)

To be honest, i missed these videos in April, but i am glad that Abbie and colleagues are covering it now: “The gnome hunting meme is a pertinent example of how subtle dog whistles can lead to widespread participation in hateful messaging, regardless of the participant’s intent.” In addition to the article you can check out John Bradley-Lestrange’s work. He is an adjunct professor at Kean University in New Jersey who specializes in the Holocaust and genocide studies. On his popular TikTok account, he breaks down some of the most pervasive antisemitic dog whistles — the secret codes used to convey anti-Jewish sentiments, Holocaust denial and other racist tropes (Forward).

🌡️ Class Dynamics and  Pakistani TikTok

We know little about working-class women’s use of social media in Muslim contexts, writes Sidra Kamran, sociologist researching gender, class, and work. 

Her article on how working-class women became early users of TikTok in Pakistan is out now in Social Media + Society. Kamran writes: In 2019, Pakistan was among the top five countries with the highest number of TikTok downloads and TikTok became the second-most downloaded social media app in the country (Shakil, 2019). 

TikTok’s early reception in Pakistan was stratified across class lines: elite users disdained the app, whereas working-class users embraced it, and TikTok became associated with a perceived “low-class” femininity (i.e., a type of femininity that is considered inferior and looked down upon by middle-class and elite members of society). 

Unprecedented numbers of women and sexual minorities engaged in gender transgressions on TikTok by challenging norms of sexual modesty, middle-class respectability, and heteronormativity. Alongside these gender transgressions, women developed new practices of “digital purdah” (digital veiling) to maintain respectability and/or hide their identity in digital spaces. A fascinating read that highlights the importance of moving beyond the West versus East and Global North versus Global South binaries to also consider internal class stratification in non-Western contexts when analyzing emerging social media practices.

Here is a Vice Video from 2021: Inside Pakistan’s War On TikTok
And here is a Definitive Guide to Proletarian TikTok recommended by Kamran

🤹‍♂️ Me, myself and i 

Happy to announce that i am a global member of the TikTok Cultures Network now – a stellar network of TikTok researchers all around the globe. Last week i got interviewed by  Deutschlandfunk Kultur (german) to talk about Russian Disinformation on TikTok (#106). I facilitated a workshop with die medienanstalten –Germany’s media regulation authority and another TikTok workshop with a German public broadcaster, consulted a German nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom for a TikTok project and was part of an advisory board of Amadeu Antonio Foundation concerning yet another TikTok project. If you want to discuss, draft, develop or drop a TikTok project – please let me know. 

🏺What else?

• France: Report calls for ban for the staff of strategic companies (Politico)

• The business of misleading migrants (PolitiFact)

• TikTok Emerges as Threat to Amazon (Bloomberg)

• TikTok is confusing by design (Vox)

• TikTok is now paying creators for long-form content (Fortune)

• Lizard-Like Airline Passenger Winking - Hoax (Forbes)

• The ‘lazy girl job’ trend (Dazed)

• TikTok Launches Music Streaming Platform In Brazil, Indonesia (Forbes)

• A viral TikTok jewelry scam (Insider)

• Parents are narrating clips of their baby’s days (Washington Post)

• wtf is happening on tiktok? (TikTok)