While the world went into lockdown, @bsemaan and I looked at how #lgbtq people experience #tiktok; you can read a blog post on @HCCDlabSU’s medium account: http://tiny.cc/jngwsz  and read the preprint here: http://tiny.cc/nngwsz  this paper will be presented at #cscw2020 1/

#tiktok has gotten some bad press recently for how it was excluding #lgbtq folks from its For You Page, however, just going off my own experiences — this wasn’t the case. So we talked to 16 lgbtq+ folks about their experiences on TikTok. 2/

We found that the #queer folks we talked to liked TikTok as it afforded them a space for creative expression, for interests but also around their identities as queer folks. Moreover, many also enjoyed how it connected them to other queer ppl 3/

Unfortunately, many also expressed discomfort with the FYP — both in how it “figured them out” too quickly for comfort, particularly around #lgbtq content or content related to where they live, but also in that the content they were seeing promoted norms about queer identity 4/

For instance, many of our participants talked about the queer folks they saw on their FYP were white, conventionally attractive, and cis. They didn’t represent our diverse participant pool. 5/

This made our participants feel as though parts of them were seen by #tiktok, while other parts were silenced or excluded. We call this phenomena #algorithmicexclusion 6/

Algorithmic exclusion is the ways in which societal power structures are constructed or reconstructed by algorithms within a bounded sociotechnical system or more broadly across societal structures. If you want to know more, check the paper http://tiny.cc/nngwsz