FROM MEMES TO MOVEMENTS: HOW TIKTOK ALGORITHMS AMPLIFY YOUTH ACTIVISM IN PAKISTAN’S 2024 ELECTIONS

Abstract

In 2024, the unprecedented rise in youth political activism was observed in the country as the elections became more political than ever as the youth took to TikTok. This working paper will look at this by discussing what Auer et al. refer to as the affordances of algorithms in regard to the promotion of youth-centered activism through TikTok as a means of transforming the discourse around digital politics. Based on the literature on media ecology theory and algorithmic activism (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Gillespie, 2018), the proposed research investigates the collective action of youth content producers who co-opted the aesthetic formats on social media (memes, lip-syncs, duets) to present issue awareness, voter registration, and protest messages. An ethnographic study was done on 2,000 politically-marked videos of TikTok videos shared in January-July 2024, and 40 semi-structured interviews were done with the youth creators aged 18-29 who had been sharing political content on TikTok in Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar. Due to quantitative findings, a powerful connection with algorithms (likes, shares, completion rate) and contents that combine humor and civic messaging may be drawn. Qualitative knowledge shows how content creators bend platform rules to find a way to make a statement without being censored. In our discussion, it is discovered that TikTok is more than a content-delivery platform, as we have found that it is also a political arena where users, mainly the young activities are vested with authority in determining stories, visibility, and energy. The results pose severe concerns to digital political communication in the spaces mediated by algorithms, and they demand more accountability by the platforms on election days (Tureck, 2015; Freelon et al., 2020).