Talk:TikTok and Race

This draft well-exceeds the required 1000 words, coming in around 2070, and descriptively takes the reader through a well organized article about TikTok and its ever-popular algorithm. The article starts off with a great opening paragraph, giving an overview of TikTok as an app and the racial issues that the app promotes. Additionally, the draft is nicely broken up into three main overarching sections with smaller subsections inside each. This is paired with numerous reliable references including those from Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and BBC News. One suggestion I have is to potentially add a paragraph on TikTok’s response to these claims of promoting White content creators over POC. This might help to make the article a bit more balanced in terms of opinions. Overall, the opening paragraph, as well as the rest of the draft, make it abundantly clear that the issue being addressed is related to TikTok and its tendency to further promote harmful racial dynamics through their algorithm. One thing to note is that at points, it did not feel like the article was completely objective. For example, in the paragraph titled “The D’Amelio Effect and Algorithmic Privilege”, statements such as “All of these stars have one thing in common - they are all white of “white-passing”.These stars were able to gain such popularity from fitting "type beauty standards" - or White beauty standards- and appealing to the majority - the White population.” do not feel completely neutral as this idea is not explicitly a confirmed fact but rather an overall notion that people feel. Similarly, I felt many of the statements in the paragraph “Digital Appropriation” followed the same direction and came off as more of personal opinion over hard fact. Overall, I think there are portions under the “Ethical Concerns” heading that need to be reworded in order to make the article more objective as a whole as a lot of it sounds more like a personal opinion piece on how TikTok doesn’t promote the right people. Something that could help this, a bit, is adding phrases like “Experts believe that” or “Some people have raised concerns about” to make it sound less like personal opinion. For example, take the phrase “...by having a famous White creator perform a dance made by a dramatically less famous Black creator, the algorithm allows for the famous White creator to have more visibility on the app, allowing her more benefits, and in some ways taking credit where credit is not due”. Specifically, the phrase “in some ways taking credit where credit is not due” makes this sentence lack objectivity since it is not a verifiable fact. However, you could change this to “There are some who are concerned that by having a famous White creator perform a dance made by a dramatically less famous Black creator, the algorithm allows for the famous White creator to have more visibility on the app, allowing her more benefits”. By attributing the opinion to the viewpoints of other people, it takes away the personal bias from the sentence. As a whole, I think the article was a great read, and I enjoyed learning more about an app that I frequently use.