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The Rise, Fall, and Rise of TikTok with Crystal Abidin

Is social media helping or harming society—or does the answer depend on who holds the power? In this episode, Eleanor Drage speaks with Crystal Abidin, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University, about the politics of social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities.


The conversation explores TikTok’s origins, the impact of platform governance and state bans, and how online spaces are shaped by competing interests and power structures. Abidin also examines how content creators, including neurodivergent and niche cultural communities, use memes, humor, and digital storytelling to build solidarity, challenge inequities, and create new forms of influence.


Crystal Abidin is Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University and a leading researcher on influencer culture, social media, digital labor, and online communities. Her work explores how internet cultures shape identity, power, and participation in the digital age.


Reading List:


Crysta'ls work:


Transcript:


Eleanor Drage (00:53) 

It's amazing to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm with Crystal Abidin, who is Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University. You're an anthropologist, an ethnographer of internet studies, and you focus especially on the internet, with internet celebrity and influencer cultures being key specialties, also social media pop cultures, and mostly in the Asia Pacific region. So lots of hot topics, and you've written plenty of really awesome government reports that I've looked at that seem extremely helpful, and white papers on social media and regulation, which is now so crucial. We're really talking about it in the UK, including the regulation of child influencers and global exchanges on TikTok. I can't wait to hear more about this. You've just been to London, and you've been promoting your book, TikTok and Youth Cultures. I wish you great success in doing that. Welcome, Crystal.


Crystal Abidin (01:53) 

Thank you, Eleanor. Thanks for having me.


Eleanor Drage (01:54) 

Firstly, can you tell us what you do aside from my short ramble, and what brings you to the topic of feminism or justice, gender, and technology?


Crystal Abidin (02:06) 

I primarily study what people do online and how internet cultures evolve in the far corners of society, and the impacts of how these changing cultures may infringe upon or improve the lives of people in the margins. Many of these "people in the margins" happen to be women and gender-diverse people. They also happen to be people of various minority ethnic groups in different societies who have to find ways to contend with the visibility they have or do not have in society, versus what a different kind of reality might be on social media. By default, in looking at things like equity, social justice, social movements, and the ways they circumvent everyday authorities, censorship, algorithms, user groups, and the like, I can see the ways technology is impacting us, but also the ways technology is helping us be creative in pushing back against these newest evolutions in society.


Eleanor Drage (03:08) 

Our three good robot questions are: what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can we get there? Or how can pro-justice ideas help us get there? I was thinking about social media as a hotly debated topic in popular media, whether it is actually a bad technology. Of course, it's far more ambivalent than that. Where do you stand on this question of good technology in relation to social media?


Crystal Abidin (03:35) 

Social media is good technology in the right hands for the right people, and bad in the wrong hands for the wrong people. It is a cop-out answer, but it's very genuine coming from an anthropologist, because the crux of the matter is, where do you stand in relation to power structures? Given standpoint theory, if you're standing with the upper echelons of society, those are primarily the people who construct and produce technology. Whether it's entrepreneurs catering to users, engineers working through features and designs, or even policy workers being the ombudsmen of morality based on community guidelines that they set, these are the folks who get a say in what trickles down to the rest of society.


Good technology can look like bad technology when it doesn't serve the common good, when people on the fringes are disproportionately absorbing the spillover effects and consequences, or when the productive advantages are not evenly spread out through the top to the bottom tail of society. The very same technology all at once can be good, bad, or in between, depending on who you ask, and also depending on when you ask it.

Oftentimes, following the hype cycle, things that are new, shiny, and sexy come across as the savior for whatever problem we're facing. This was the case with mobile media, then social media, then messaging groups, and the latest hype that we have from big data, all the way down to AI, and now generative AI. Of course, as these ideas become mainstream, people who start using them and testing them daily start to uncover all the nooks and crannies, turn over every rock, and find out that behind the good areas pour inequities and very terrible structural discrimination.


Let's think about the content moderators who are literally holding up the internet, making sure that content that filters through passes censorship. Let's think about the workers who are assembling phones in very poor working conditions, at the cost of their health. Let's also think about the people who are guinea pigs testing technologies, volunteering their data, their time, and labor in order to improve something in beta before it gets launched. It's about timing, where we stand in society, and what we can take away from it, which means good technology is good for some people and not for others.


Eleanor Drage (06:05) 

Even if I'm scrolling through content at a time of day when it's not impacting my offline life, and it's only five minutes of heated rivalry content rather than 45 minutes of something that might be more distressing to me, the way that a technology is created and the infrastructure make it either good or bad. There is still a fundamental ambivalence, but you cannot have good technology if the labor, natural materials, and resources that go into it have been extracted in a way that is fundamentally negative to the planet.


Crystal Abidin (06:44) 

From a sociological point of view, if you were to extrapolate and take a bird's-eye view of power structures, even if something benefits you personally, the benefit that trickles down to you is at the expense of someone else or something else. Then, from an anthropological point of view, cultures that seem inane, mundane, mainstream, tacit, and accepted to you might be violently disagreeable to somebody else next door or across the street. Depending on whether you are concerned about the interconnectedness of everyone in society, and depending on whether you are someone who is keenly aware of cultural relativism and the fallacies of ethnocentrism, these may or may not be front-of-mind questions for you.


Eleanor Drage (07:29) 

Absolutely. And there's something that we're not encouraged to think about by the tech companies that obscure all those things beneath the shiny, exciting facades of their technologies. Let's just park these difficult moral questions for a second and talk about TikTok. You are one of the most prominent scholars of the social media platforms, and I'd love to hear from you: how did TikTok begin? Where did it come from, and how were people onboarded?


Crystal Abidin (07:56) 

In my book TikTok and Youth Cultures, I argued that there are merits to origin stories. So many, in fact, that I'm only going to pick one, and that's not even the complete story, just for us to get the conversation going. If you were to ask someone who is in Gen Z, they would tell you TikTok is parasiting two predecessor apps: one, Dubsmash; two, Musical.ly.

Dubsmash was a really popular app where young people would dub over any kind of video materials, sometimes dubbing accurately word-for-word, such that they go viral for their technical skill, sometimes being really savvy, ironic, and cynical, and being able to decode contrasting messages in it, so people enjoyed it. Or sometimes having sheer theatrics, eyebrow movements, facial expressions, and being able to perform well, so people enjoyed the recreation. Dubsmash trained a whole cohort of young people on how to take source content and remix it.


Musical.ly, in its heyday, it was primarily known as a dance app. It was the app where, with background music, young people would create dances mostly with their upper body and their hands, like Para Para Sakura style, if you're a millennial like me and familiar with those arcade game machines from the '90s. There were scripts here: which songs followed which designs, how to orchestrate your hand movements, your finger placements, etc.


TikTok, in its predecessor form, existed as an app known as Douyin in the Chinese domestic market. It at that time was a short video app that encouraged people to come on board and sing, like a sing-along karaoke-style kind of app. As it was expanding and deciding to launch internationally, the company absorbed Musical.ly, which, of course, was heavily influenced by Dubsmash. We see how one of the first cohorts globally of young people on TikTok just happened to be the people attrited from Musical.ly and Dubsmash, that being Gen Z, who brought their creativity there.


If you were to ask this question to an entrepreneur, to a government regulator, or perhaps even to people who onboarded on TikTok when it became mainstream during the pandemic, these would bring you very different answers. But the long and the short of a first origin story or a taster is that Gen Z were onboarded because they were going after the next big thing. The next big thing was bought over, parasited, absorbed, and that's where they had their mass migration to TikTok.


Eleanor Drage (10:29) 

What were some initial experiences of the platform? Because it was very different then than it is now.


Crystal Abidin (10:36) 

One hundred percent. Here in Australia, where I live and work, TikTok, in its heyday, I would say about 2019, was used as a civics movement app. It was mostly where young people were practicing citizen journalism, primarily because we have the annual bushfire season in summer, with global warming really impacting this part of the world. During bushfire season around December 2018, January 2019, and again in December 2019 and January 2020, young Australians across the country were taking to TikTok to showcase what life was really like during the season.


People who live in the bush, in the regional areas, were sharing short snippets of how wildlife were escaping into their compounds, how they were helping to rescue koalas, and how they were trying to bring to the attention of governments, policymakers, stakeholders, and even teachers that climate change was something they were very passionate about. This, of course, coincided with the global student protests led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. So we saw this very nice, symbolic, collective effervescence of young people on TikTok using it for their own grassroots-based social justice movement.


That is an origin story I think we now tend to forget, because the discourse that's easier to digest, that doesn't really require fidelity to history, is that young people are just dancing or doing funny stunts on the app, or that it's become a dance and music app that gets people popular or famous overnight, or so the Netflix documentaries tell us. But in reality, TikTok is many things for many different people, and I'm very grateful to have been there from the beginning, at least to document several of these origin stories.


Eleanor Drage (12:20) 

And saving wildlife is still very much my favorite content on the internet. I love watching people shoo little creatures to safety and, in animal welfare centers, cuddle animals that most of us never get to go anywhere near. I think that's part of the joy of the internet. Particularly in the UK and our little island, we don't get close to much of the world's wildlife and don't know that much of it exists. So to see it up close and to see these really intimate human-animal relationships is a really special thing and certainly fills me with joy.


Crystal Abidin (13:02) 

There was actually a very popular meme from Australia that made it big in the UK during this time. Those who remember that time might remember a meme known as Australia Is Burning. The funniest version of it I saw was young people in the UK putting water from the tap into envelopes, slapping a stamp on it, and sending it to Australia, as if that little bit of water could help put our bushfires out. It was funny and humorous, but in the grand scheme of things, it was young people trying to show solidarity through humor. Humor is often the way they lubricate very difficult conversations and make them palatable for people to have more interactive discussions.


Eleanor Drage (13:40) 

There's a perception that young people lack humor, that they're overly sensitive or don't have humor. That's a kind of right-wing argument that has been pushed quite successfully in the UK. But you can see on these apps that there is so much humor, a real diversity of humor, and a way of approaching the crises that young people live in, in a way that also has levity. Is that a new thing?


Crystal Abidin (14:07) 

No, I think young people have always been really good at social steganography, or hiding messages in plain sight. As once upon a time young people ourselves, I'm sure we were well-versed in leetspeak, slang, and lingo, and it was something that made us feel camaraderie with people in our generation. It also felt a bit affirming and sneaky that we could have these conversations out in the open with people listening and tuning in, but not having the knowledge to decode exactly what we're saying.


This is a framework I introduced in prior work a few years ago that I termed Refracted Publics. It used to be that we would think of publics as networked: the more you share, the more others share of this. With networks, something that is shared by you can be seen by an audience that you never knew, due to the multiplication of people resharing and reposting. Now, with refracted publics, it works in this way too, except that while you've got access to the info, you may not have the legibility to decode what it actually means.


We also have to think about this in tandem with parody culture and sarcasm. If you only have basic knowledge of something, you may decode just a very basal level of how this is just comedy or humor. But if you're in the know, you can tell the signs, you know the symbols, and you know the language. More importantly, if you are there at the right time and you know the issues that are happening, this gives you extra context to decode the political messages, and maybe some even subversive conversations happening right before your eyes. I think it's wonderful that young people, ourselves included, and the young people to come, have these types of generational creativity to reach out to each other.


Eleanor Drage (15:50) 

When I think about the in-jokes of the internet, one of the things I see a lot of is in the cat Instagram community. There was once somebody who spelled cat wrong as "car," but of course, cats also make this really aggressive purring sound that does sound a bit like a car. Then everyone started using the term "car" instead of "cat." These in-jokes of the internet have always been very powerful. Is there a way that young people master this way of communicating with each other and use it to form groups and solidarities online?


Crystal Abidin (16:28) 

For sure. In TikTok and Youth Cultures, one of my favorite chapters is Memes and Capital. In that chapter, I introduce five new types of capital that young people practice on that app: niche, subcultural, cross-cultural, discursive, and cross-platform. Exactly what you described, Eleanor, falls under this nice umbrella of niche capital.


Young people need to know: what are the boundaries of humor? What would fall flat with my audience? What would possibly go viral or be memeable in this space? All of this requires not just digital literacy, and not just app-based technical literacy, but a subcultural literacy that binds you to people of your cohort to know what sticks and what is stale, what would appeal to your homie on the street versus what would only appeal to grandpa at Thanksgiving or Christmas.


Honing these kinds of literacies requires young people to always be in the know, to extrapolate from themselves and their social groups how people would imagine the content they're putting out there. It's really training them in skills that I feel can be applied to life later on. It may feel like a bit of a stretch if you're a parent or a teacher to feel like memes can actually be pedagogical and useful, but the reality is they are. It requires a lot of skill to make one, to decode one, and to have one successfully circulate. More often than you know, these memes are not just carrying humor; they're carrying subtext, decoding messages, and sometimes even political messaging that young people would really like to get out there to their target audiences.


Eleanor Drage (18:07) 

Can it be a real challenge for neurodivergent kids to tap into this humor, or perhaps a shared way of communicating online that is difficult to understand? On the other hand, is it a way that helps neurodivergent kids manage the offline world, which is incredibly confusing emotionally, and understand the way that people are using language and what they're trying to express? Does the online space give them a little bit more insight into social norms and expectations?


Crystal Abidin (18:41) 

Neurodivergent people, or as TikTok would call them, or call us, "neurospicy" folks, are a very big subculture and community on TikTok. It is a wonderful space to find like-minded others, literally, because the design of the algorithm helps to sort people and users into what my colleagues Katherine Tienenberg, Nati Hendry, and I call silo sociality. Rather than thinking of a networked online community, think about TikTok as having very narrow streams, just like silos that hold grain and flour. The moment you are successfully slotted into just one stream, everything there is very niche, rabbit-holed, deep, and esoteric to that specific genre. You can see how neurodiverse or neurospicy people can really thrive in those spaces if they fall into the correct silos.


Another beautiful thing about TikTok is that there are often explainers, tutorials, or accounts specifically dedicated to explaining what's happening. Whenever something goes viral because it's a trend, the next wave of virality consists of people producing explainers and tutorials. You might get the info 12 hours late, or a full 24 hours late, but at some point, TikTok becomes self-referential, and there is a whole pipeline of educating people on what the vernacular means. Of course, the moment the vernacular becomes mainstream, meaning it begins to be used by politicians, teachers, or makes headlines in the news, then it becomes stale, and young people move on to the next thing altogether.


Eleanor Drage (20:18) 

I saw the Pope doing "six, seven" in a crowd. I mean, I don't think it's a deepfake, but maybe he's trying to push it away. Who knows what the effect of that will be? I really want to talk about the ban of TikTok in January 2025. It was a 12-hour-plus ban, and you say new communities emerged and were spotlighted after. What happened? What was this ban, if anyone doesn't remember it, and what were the effects?


Crystal Abidin (20:52) 

Because the ban has no concern or respect for people with book production deadlines, my book was sent into print right as this happened. I remember being on a plane and feeling like I really needed to write about this because I was still collecting data post-submission. Thankfully, my very kind publisher allowed me to add in a late-notice epilogue. I have a blow-by-blow in the book on exactly what unfolded on TikTok itself as the ban happened.

When it was first announced, we saw the proliferation of curtain calls. TikTok communities were self-identifying as American and saying, "This is my eulogy, this is my farewell." It was also a time of a lot of exposés where people who were found to be faking American accents were actually based in the UK, or people who are American but actually diaspora-based elsewhere, and so not impacted by this ban. It was a very interesting time of self-revelation.

During this curtain call, we also had memes that alluded to how young people cared very little for how governments were handling diplomacy. One of my favorite memes that circulated at this time was young Americans going, "Goodbye to my personal Chinese spy," and Chinese youth, diaspora, and domestic around the world, going, "Farewell, my American person that I'm meant to be spying on." It was an inside joke about how, in reality, they would miss the landscape of TikTok, playing into the moral panic that even the granular details of everyday life they share there might be of interest to spies at the diplomatic level.

Post-curtain call, even before the ban, migrations began to alternative apps. Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book, RedNote, or RED, became the go-to destination for a lot of American TikTokers. They were calling themselves "TikTok refugees" in that space. At first, it was taken as a joke. Even on Xiaohongshu, lots of the domestic users were saying, "Do you actually know what a real refugee looks like? How bold of you to register. How bold of you to also now be cosplaying what refugees look like, you and your skits and your tattered clothes and makeup messed up on your face with a suitcase."


Soon, with the TikTok refugee discourse, we also saw a lot of pushback because American TikTokers do not happen to be the most culturally sensitive people on that app. For context, Xiaohongshu, being a Chinese domestic app, contains content primarily in Chinese. As American TikTokers were on there, they were commenting on the most viral posts and the biggest users, saying, "Speak English. I don't understand what's happening. There are Americans here. This is a global app." You can see some nationalism, ethnocentrism, and colonialism in this discourse that faced a lot of pushback, and tensions arose between both groups.


Then the message started to settle in. The ban seemed like it was really going to go forth, and Orientalism began to take over. There were Americans on the app trying to mimic Orientalist accents, saying, "This is what I sound like one day on Xiaohongshu, one week, two weeks, a month," and their English would deteriorate with exaggerations of what they think a Chinese accent sounds like. It was not tasteful, let's put it that way. It was really a veneer of digital colonialism in the guise of humor.


There were also big revelations from TikTokers who were already earning a good income on the app, realizing, "I'm going to lose my follower base. I have to shuttle them elsewhere to keep the millions of people I've collected here." All sorts of memes were baiting followers to follow these TikTokers onto other platforms, especially Instagram Reels, Xiaohongshu, YouTube, and other legacy platforms. They were dropping bombshells like, "We were not really dating," "I'm actually gay," "My child's not mine," or "This guy's not my boyfriend, he's my dad." So many people were bursting the bubble on either a long-running inside joke, an industry secret, or just collapsing their branding altogether to get people to follow them for part two of the story.


On the 19th of January, the app was banned in the US. It was very quiet for a while. On the internet, without the Americans, people on TikTok kind of celebrated. We called ourselves Commonwealth-Talk, Euro-Talk, British-Talk, Africa-Talk, etc. Basically, because of the absence of Americans, who make up a large volume of users, global talk allowed users to see the rest of the world, and the content was very different. We got to see a day in the life of folks elsewhere, and the landscape for palatable humor was different. Folks were even pushing back on grammar and spelling, my favorite being "colour," "neighbour," "humour," centimeters, kilograms, and Celsius. It was all fun at the expense of the missing Americans, for all of 14 hours.


The next day, Americans returned to TikTok after a full 14 hours of in-app prompts saying that the app was going to be back. When it did, it also prompted that it was thanks to the results of President Trump's efforts. It was kind of awkward for the folks coming back after breaking their brand, after the big revelations, and after sullying relationships they had with the rest of the world's creators. But they soon returned, and in the aftermath, there was post-grief, post-migration, and post-return. People realized TikTok actually really is central to our lives, and we're going to try and recover from it; we're going to continue business as usual. I would say it was only about two weeks after that, this was no longer a conversation, and it felt like nothing at all had ever happened. In fact, many of the TikTokers who immigrated to RedNote ended up abandoning their accounts altogether. You can see now a graveyard of American RedNote accounts that stopped posting right about the time the ban was revoked in January 2025.


Eleanor Drage (27:15) 

Fascinating digital artifacts remain there to tell this story. Even though it was only 14 hours, my goodness, did things shift and happen on the platform. For listeners, it was all part of Trump's desire to take over companies that he thought were extremely successful. That was part of the media rhetoric, certainly here in the UK. Trump also decided that he really wanted to buy Nvidia, or he felt that this hugely successful Taiwanese chip manufacturer should belong to the US. It was the same with TikTok, although I think Trump also had a real fondness for TikTok itself because he thought he was a TikTok star at one point and was very excited about that.


Finally, influencers. We would be remiss if we didn't talk about them. I want to ask you something slightly different, though: what do different linguistic cultures call influencers? Because we only hear that word, I think, in the Anglosphere. How does it vary?


Crystal Abidin (28:23) 

Let's talk about the English-speaking world. I think the tension now is moving from "influencer" to "content creator," but before this, it was folks moving from calling themselves "micro-celebrities" to "influencers." Even before that, there was a whole plethora of platform-specific terms like blogger, YouTuber, streamer, tweeter, and so on. In my research, I broadly refer to all of these categories of figures as internet celebrity, because this term focuses on the visibility of these folks rather than the quality of the celebrity, the morality of why they're visible, or whether people love or hate them.


Around the world in different language groups, multiple words may be equivalent, or that feel like conceptual synonyms. Let's look to China as an example. Wanghong, literally translating to "internet red," feels like the biggest catch-all, similar to internet celebrity. But Wanghong also implies something slightly different. It may refer to people who are popular online, but it primarily refers to their ability to broker or parlay their visibility into profit, income, and getting people to purchase things that they're selling.


There are more terms that are specific to practices. For instance, streamers, who are really popular given the rise of live shopping and livestream e-commerce, might be called Zhibo. You might also see people who are categorized based on their function, so someone who is called a Liuliang Mingxing, or a "volume star," is popular because they are able to bring literally volumes of traffic whenever they're online, whatever it is they do. Notice how that doesn't really indicate what they're popular for, or whether or not there's e-commerce attached to it. I find that these Chinese terms, though platform- and practice-specific, allow for these nuances to carry through.


Across the water, another side of my research focuses on Korea. One example in Korea would be the Inssa. It can be loosely translated to an influencer, but some Gen Z also use inssa to refer to very popular people—people who are famous among kids because of their fashion trends, or even Instagram influencers.


As a final example, let's look at Japan. Japan has a knack for calling every internet celebrity a "YouTuber," because for a long time, the one platform that helped to institutionalize making money and platform programs from your online visibility was YouTube. Remember also that Japan already had a very big domestic celebrity culture that did not need to use the vocabulary of influencers. Japanese idols and idol groups, for example, were already popular on social media, livestreaming their performances in underground pubs in order to get an audience before they formally debuted with a company. We also had the likes of Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid that is entirely 3D. We may think of her as a predecessor to the AI or virtual influencers we know of today. Someone like Hatsune Miku, who is a hologram, is also popular in the flesh, holding physical concerts, and is an influencer herself, promoting different kinds of brands on social media.


Why have we ended up calling influencers in Japan YouTubers? Primarily because video has been the primary mode there for a very long time. If we were to look at government regulation in Japan, YouTube and YouTubers are more strongly governed because of the ways we can measure the duration of their videos, what time of day they should be posting, and how clearly they should be announcing whether or not a product is sponsored or whether a message has been paid for.


A lot of these terms feel like they're interchangeable until you get to that country, that culture, and that platform, and realize they mean very specific things to specific people. If you're an academic or if you're a student working through your literature review, this is probably a pain you know very well. The search terms you use to look for the news or the scholarship will bring you in different directions and highlight different ideologies behind those histories.


Eleanor Drage (32:55) 

Crystal, thank you so much for joining me here today. This was immensely informative. For everybody listening, go out and buy her brilliant books, including TikTok and Youth Cultures. It was a phenomenal insight into a world that we spend so much time on. Thank you, Crystal.


Crystal Abidin (33:13) 

Thank you, Eleanor. I appreciate this time.

 
 
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