"Honestly, I Think TikTok has a Vendetta Against Black Creators": Understanding Black Content Creator Experiences on TikTok

Abstract

As video-sharing social-media platforms have increased in popularity, a 'creator economy' has emerged in which platform users make online content to share with wide audiences, often for profit. As the creator economy has risen in popularity, so have concerns of racism and discrimination on social media. Black content creators across multiple platforms have identified challenges with racism and discrimination, perpetuated by platform users, companies that collaborate with creators for sponsored content, and the algorithms governing these platforms. In this work, we provide a qualitative study of the experiences of Black content creators on one video-sharing platform, TikTok. We conduct 12 semi-structured interviews with Black TikTok content creators to understand their experiences, identify the challenges they face, and understand their perceptions of the platform. We find that some common challenges include: content moderation, monetization, harassment and bullying from viewers, lack of transparency of recommendation and filtering algorithms, and the perception that content from Black creators is treated unfairly by those algorithms. We then suggest design interventions to mitigate the challenges, bolster positive aspects, and overall cultivate an inclusive algorithmic experience for Black creators on TikTok