Abstract

The Breonna Taylor case was another instance of police brutality that reached popularity during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Even without mainstream media coverage, protesters were able to use social media to sensitize, engage and inform about the protest, to reach huge popularity worldwide. Often self-positioning as a space for leisure and creativity, TikTok was used by its audience as a platform to interact and perform new practices of political participation (Medina Serrano et al., 2020). The aim of this work is to understand how the use of sound can shape political expression through the platform, the actors involved in the process, and the audience’s perception. Following the theoretical framework tied to the dynamics of networked participation (Boccia Artieri, 2021) and the relationship between music, politics, and TikTok, we focused on searchability through sound as one of the main affordances of the platform. We qualitatively evaluated each piece of content produced from July 2020 to May 2022, collecting 1644 videos and the 5 highly ranked comments for each of them. The results suggest that TikTok can frame the political narrative and participation through its affordances, structure, and visibility logic