Abstract
ABSTRACT The collapsing of social contexts online and its impact on identify, privacy, and self-presentation have been widely documented. However, the increased levels of conflict and misunderstanding that those collapsing contexts trigger requires more scholarly attention. Informed by social informatics, this paper examines collapsing contexts and TikTok’s features that support reciprocal trolling. A comparative case analysis of three TikTok influencers reveals how they took advantage of the platform’s features (Duet, Stich, Share, and Sounds); how they developed their own trolling style and utilized a different repertoire of trolling tactics in initiating and in responding to trolling; and how they proactively utilized social, spatial, and temporal collapsing contexts in their reciprocal trolling activities. The study makes two significant contributions to research by (1) extending our understanding of collapsing contexts beyond the reactive notion of flattened contexts, contributing to social informatics a nuanced understanding of context; and by (2) demonstrating how TikTok’s features foster reciprocal trolling and the process by which it spills over into other social media platforms, raising a need for more cross-platform research.
Published Version
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