Project Report
Summary
Youths, in particular, the Gen Z group, are known to be expressive on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Cleverly using visuals to express their feelings, copy trends, post hashtag challenges, the Gen Z group marks a demographic that has been rarely understood in terms of their political and social beliefs.
Looking at the video platform TikTok, we aim to look at TikTok influencers in several key Southeast Asian markets that have seen recent developments in its political and social movement. By analyzing these influencers’ content and their followers’ reaction to the postings, we hope to develop an understanding of Gen Z’s behavior and usage of social media, especially during periods when there are political turbulences or heightened social unrest.
This can be achieved through curating comments towards posts made by TikTok influencers who are known for content tied to social and current trends, thus drawing out socio-political sentiments during news breaks. Overall, this provides an outlook into how Gen Z consumes information and if they are susceptible to misinformation floating on social media platforms.
Need
Four years since it launched in September 2016, TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, with about 800 million current users worldwide, according to the Digital 2020 report released in January 2020. The app’s explosion with users posting comedic, dance, and lip-sync videos has seen even more downloads in 2020 after a global pandemic kept most of the world under lockdown. In Southeast Asia, which has a population of about 658 million, the application has been downloaded “more than 360 million” times, based on data from mobile application data research firm Sensor Tower, as cited by Reuters in an August 2020 article.
According to a Global Times report, it is among the top 10 application downloads in countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. However, there is currently little data available showing how people consume and share information through TikTok, a platform dominated by teen and young adult users (69 percent are 13 to 24 years old).
Generation Z is defined as those below 25 years old. While the app’s gain to fame among users stemmed from home videos that went viral, TikTok users have also dipped their toes into political expressions. In the United States, TikTok users banded together by signing up to go for a Trump rally in Tulsa and then not show up. In Indonesia, female TikTok users claiming to be mistresses of MPs posted videos tagged as “Remember me?” threatening to expose affairs if Indonesian ministers do not reverse a controversial jobs creation law.
Currently, viral content on the platform only gains attention in the public sphere if it gets picked up by mainstream media or goes viral on other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Given the immense pick-up speed and vast usage of the application in particular among the young voters’ demographic, plus a shift in public usage of the platform during political or social crises, analysis into the behavioral use, information consumption, and potential misinformation trickle effect on the platform must be conducted.
Thus far, little research has been done analyzing content on TikTok, while other social media platforms have been studied more thoroughly. Through the proposed study, the researchers aim to provide initial insight on how people from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines use TikTok to communicate and engage with information and hopefully kick-off further research on the matter. Moreover, understanding information consumption among youths would help map out thematic content that appeals to the group, allowing researchers to identify key points where misinformation can occur.
Ultimately, having a better understanding of how people make use of technological platforms, such as TikTok, would equip media professionals, members of civil society, and even governments to come up with more effective ways to combat any potential mis- and disinformation, hate speech, and harassment that tends to proliferate on social media.
Objectives
To explore how Gen Z in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines consume information on Tik Tok.
To study how TikTok Gen Z consumers react to information shared by TikTok content creators.
To investigate how content creators use TikTok for information sharing.
To explore the existence of misinformation in the TikTok sphere concerning select political and social issues.
To publish a digital story based on the study's findings with a news publisher.
To publish a research paper based on the research findings since there are limited studies on TikTok as a democratic tool in the Southeast Asian context.
To organize a seminar to share the findings of this project with the interested researchers, journalists, and media practitioners in Southeast Asia.
Project Period: March 1, 2021 - November 30, 2021
Online Seminar
Date: Nov 23, 2021 (Tuesday)
Time: 10AM MYT
Description: We will be organizing our seminar 'TikTok: Information consumption among Gen Z in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines' on November 23, 2021 (Tuesday) at 10.00 am. Through their annual conference SMILE, we will co-organize the seminar with the Center for Research on Media and Communication at the National University of Malaysia (UKM).
All participants from the conference are invited to join our seminar.
Team Member Roles:
Name
Nuurrianti Jalil
Role
To administer the whole project with support from the team members, to identify and interview influencers, develop a research framework, assist with data analyses, write an academic paper, and an article for The Conversation. Will present the report's findings at the online seminar.
Trinna Leong
To identify and interview influencers, write up an article, and digest the research’s findings into consumable information in the form of interactive data visualization. Also co-organizing the webinar to provide engagement with journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers.
Meeko Angela Camba
To identify, select, and interview key influencers, and produce engaging and relevant write-ups on the study’s findings. Will support coordinating the online seminar to share research findings with journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers.
Yik Wai Chee
To reach out to targeted influencers and interview them, strategic planning and producing engaging writing for publication. Will support coordinating online webinar to share research findings with relevant stakeholders.
Extended Team
The team recruited two research assistants and a data analyst
RA for Indonesia & Malaysia:
Irma Garnesia, Researcher and Fact-checker at Tirto.id
RA for Philippines:
Rachel Rosalie T. Torres, Graduate student of Master of Arts in Media Studies major in Broadcast Communication majoring in Social Media Influencers and Social Media Trends, University of the Philippines-Diliman
Data Analyst:
DR. IKA K. IDRIS, Lecturer at Paramadina Graduate School of Communication, Jakarta
Conducting Research
Identifying Hashtags and TikTok Contents for this Project
In deciding what hashtag to look into, we read up on what social issues caused trending hashtags on social media, preferably cited by each country’s local news source. Once a specific hashtag was chosen, we checked keyword variations of the issue and its given hashtag. Then, we chose the ones with the highest view counts on TikTok.
Indonesia
Among the videos that used the hashtag, we purposefully sampled videos posted in a specific timeframe in the year 2020. For example, in Indonesia, We chose the hashtag on the Omnibus Law issue based on the most trending hashtag picked up by an article from CNN Indonesia. It then became the basis for us to determine which hashtag we should go for. Some of the hashtags mentioned by CNN Indonesia was #tolakomnibuslaw, #tolakruuciptakerja, #mositidakpercaya, and #kpopers. However, not all hashtags from CNN Indonesia were chosen since some of them, such as the #kpopers hashtag, might be too general for the search and unrelated to the Omnibus Law issue.
Although the Koppers (fans of Kpop) also contributed to the protest by sharing their coins on wideranged social media through videos, memes, or comment tweets. We ventured through the hashtags related to Omnibus Law, also combined with the other hashtags used by the creators, and chose the popular content that appeared from October 2020. There are five hashtags that we consider most popular or widely used to describe the issue; #tolakomnibuslaw (2.5B views), #mositidakpercaya (1.6B views), #tolakruuciptakerja (1.5B views), #omnibuslaw (1.3B views), and #omnibuslawciptakerja (208.5M views) per April 28th, 2021. We collected the ten most popular videos for every hashtag on our dataset and monitored the content through the sender, content published, followers, likes, comments, and video description.
Malaysia
In the case of Malaysia, we were looking for five hashtags that revolve around the issue Make School A Safer Place. The issue started when a Malaysian teenager, Ain Husniza, posted a video on TikTok, voicing her discomfort when her male teacher allegedly joked about rape during class, which went viral in early May 2021.
However, since there were only two hashtags around this issue, we decided to go with #MakeSchoolASaferPlace with 10.5M views and #MakeSchoolsSafe, which has 1.6M views as of May 5th, 2021. We consider these hashtags are most popular or widely used to describe the issue, in which other teenagers also shared their take on rape jokes, school system, or misogyny that are apparent in the country. It also seems like young Malaysians are frustrated and, subsequently, eager to speak up when given the right momentum by Ain Husniza.
However, since we were initially going with five hashtags to collect 50 videos, two hashtags with #MakeSchoolASaferPlace and #MakeSchoolsSafe are not enough to do that. Given that there is also unrelated content on TikTok, we added one more hashtag, #KerajaanGagal, which has 3.7M views per May 20th, 2021. The idea for adding the #KerajaanGagal hashtag was because we were exploring the “brewing social discontent” in Malaysia, and we thought that the social protest under the #KerajaanGagal hashtag on April and May 2021, related to the second lockdown in Malaysia, falls under the umbrella of brewing social discontent.
With that grip, collected 15 videos from #MakeSchoolASaferPlace and #MakeSchoolsSafe and 20 videos from #KerajaanGagal. We did not find videos that used multiple hashtags. However, we removed the videos unrelated to the issue, such as Netflix advertisement or video that does not talk about protest/social discontent either.
Philippines
In the Philippines, in July 2020, about five months into the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, President Rodrigo Duterte enacted the controversial Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), a stricter version of the country’s Human Security Act of 2007. The Anti-Terrorism Act led to petitions that raised 20 issues, questioned 25 provisions of the law, and pointed to conflict with five principles in jurisprudence (such as separation of powers and rules of court) along with three other laws. In addition, petitioners jointly argue the law violates 15 of the 22 rights listed under the 1987 Constitution’s Article Three: Bill of Rights.
With the commotion the act has caused, people started expressing their response towards this bill. The hashtag #JunkTerrorBill trended the most on various social media platforms, as cited by CNN Philippines. For this research, we looked into the other variations related to the act and the trending hashtags to see which are the top of videos with the most views on TikTok.
The hashtags related to ATA are the following:
#JunkTerrorBill with 9.0M views, #JunkTerrorBillNow with 2.4M, #AntiTerrorBill with 1.1M, #JunkTerrorLaw with 73.1K views, and lastly #JunkTerrorBillNowPH with 44.1K views.
With these, we looked into 10 TikTok videos per hashtag, with a total of 50 videos to look into. The videos selected were limited to those posted within July 1-14, 2020, a week before, during, and a few days after the bill was officially approved by the Philippine Congress. We were aware of the possibility that the video might be unavailable during the research since creators could delete their videos or make their accounts private. There were three videos that were later found missing from the pages as we observed each video’s comments to analyze its sentiment. Hence, we changed the three private videos with other publicly available contents, or at least still available until the process of monitoring comments was finished.
Conducting Interviews
Selecting Informants and Developing Interview Guide
For this project we selected our informants (i.e TikTok content creators) based on two key criteria - We selected our informants based on these criteria.
Viral TikTok video with over 50,000 views related to the topic or hashtags explored, and have more than 10,000 followers on TikTok.
We developed a brief interview guide each for Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to get a better insight on how well-performing content creators, in terms of views, make use and engage with social and/or political messages on the platform.
All three guides contained several common questions that covered a range of information, from basic details about the content creators’ personal motivations and process in producing TikTok videos to their stance on utilizing the platform beyond entertainment.
The guides likewise featured specific questions pertaining to the issues of concern that the research team had chosen to study for each country. This included questions on the content creators’ opinions on TikTok videos that talked about Indonesia’s Omnibus Law for Job Creation, the Philippines’ AntiTerrorism Law of 2020, and/or the #makeschoolasaferplace campaign in Malaysia. During the actual interviews, we took liberties in asking follow-up questions that were not included in the guide to dive deeper into related topics that the content creators themselves felt important.
Categorization for sentiment analysis
Indonesia
Positive
The comment leads to sympathy or support for the Omnibus Law and political actors who support the law—President, the national government, the legislative, political parties.
Negative
The comment leads to criticism or rejection of the Omnibus Bill and political actors who support the —President, national government, legislative, political parties.
Neutral
The comment is not related to the Omnibus Bill or the political actors involved. For example, information about the content creator, expressing feelings about the video, or commenting on the music in the video.
Malaysia
Positive
For the hashtag #makeschoolasaveplace: The comment leads to sympathy or support for sexual harassment at school.
·For the hashtag #kerajaangagal: The comment leads to sympathy or support toward the Malaysian government
Negative
·For the hashtag #makeschoolasaveplace: The comment leads to criticism or rejection of sexual harassment in school.
·For the hashtag #kerajaangagal: The comment leads to criticism or rejection of the Malaysian government.
Neutral
For the hashtag #makeschoolasaveplace: The comment is not related to sexual harassment in school.
·For the hashtag #kerajaangagal: The comment is not related to any government’s policy and program, or the Malaysian government.
The Philippines
Positive
The comment leads to sympathy or support for the Anti-Terrorism Law and political actors who support the law (government, parliament, political parties).
Negative
The comments lead to criticism or rejection of the Anti-Terrorism Law and political actors who support the law (government, Parliament, political parties).
Neutral
The comment is not related to the Anti-Terrorism Law and political actors who support the law (government, Parliament, political parties), or the information relates to other information in the content or about the content creator.
Intercoder-reliability
Two coders who understand Bahasa Indonesia, Melayu, Filipino, and English conducted intercoder reliability tests thrice using 150 comments as the test sample. The final reliability score of between 80% and 95% across all categories indicates a high-reliability index.
Developing Misinformation Framework
Since the study is exploratory in nature, we did not have a dataset of TikTok content that had already been predetermined by fact-check organizations or other researchers as misinformation. Therefore, we had to come up with a framework that would first determine which among the TikTok videos and comments it tracked had the potential to misinform.
We based our misinformation framework on the criteria for determining verifiable statements of VERA Files (click here) in the Philippines and that of Tirto.id (see here) in Indonesia. Both organizations are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network. We also took into account the 10-point list of red flags and tips in identifying misinformation noted by Colleen Sinclair, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the Mississippi State University, in a March 2020 article at The Conversation.
We manually evaluated all of the TikTok videos and comments it monitored for all three countries to determine if they met the following criteria:
Statement of fact
A statement of fact pertains to claims and/or posts that can be verified to be either true or inaccurate (i.e. fake, false, misleading, baseless, or lacking in context). Opinions, predictions, speculations, and other similar statements are not eligible for fact-checking because they cannot be independently corroborated or debunked by publicly available information.
Relevance
The claim or post should be relevant to the public interest — in the case of this research, relevant to the issues selected by the research team for each country (i.e. Indonesia’s Omnibus Law on Job Creation, the Philippines’ Anti-Terrorism Law of 2020, and Malaysia’s #makeschoolasaferplace campaign).
Feasibility
For a claim or post to be deemed fact-checkable, there should be “readily available” credible records or experts that may be interviewed on the topic to corroborate, debunk, or give it context (VERA Files, 2020).
Once all the monitored TikTok videos and comments were analyzed based on this three-point criteria, we classified each as “CONTAINING MISINFORMATION,” “NOT CONTAINING MISINFORMATION,” or “POSSIBLY CONTAINING MISINFORMATION.”
Videos and/or comments that were tagged as “containing misinformation” are those that passed the three-point criteria (statement of fact, relevant, and feasible) and were verified as inaccurate by team members using publicly available information from authoritative and credible sources. For instance, claims pertaining to the contents of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 for Philippine data were checked against the actual provisions of the law.
Pieces of content that were tagged as “not containing misinformation” either failed the three-point criteria (meaning they were not statements of fact, not relevant, or not feasible to be fact-checked in the first place) or passed but were verified to be accurate based on authoritative and credible sources. These included videos and comments that merely contained subjective statements, such as opinions or speculation.
Meanwhile, we tagged as “possibly containing misinformation” the videos and/or comments that passed the three-point criteria but the veracity of which remains unchecked.
Some pieces of content (i.e. videos) were tagged as “UNCERTAIN” because they were later unavailable for reviewing (e.g. account made private; video removed) and thus could not be verified using the misinformation framework.
Watch our presentation of this project in the webinar section tab for details on the research findings
Citing format APA7
Jalli, N. et. al. (2021, Nov 30). Consumption of Information Among Gen-Z In Malaysia, Indonesia, and The Philippines. https://sites.google.com/view/techcamp-tiktok/project-report.