Big Tech, Platform Capitalism, and Youth Resistance: Social Uses and Appropriations of TikTok among University Students in Mexico

Abstract

The struggle for the global digital market maintains the capitalist pattern of property concentration through new forms of media integration within the economic structure of sociodigital platforms. Within platform capitalism, these platforms have rapidly integrated themselves into global everyday life, particularly among young people, as their technological features facilitate social interaction through a highly selective algorithm delivering personalized content. TikTok is particularly noteworthy, as it has achieved the highest growth rate worldwide owing to its dynamic audiovisual content; it is also remarkable for its Chinese origins as part of the Baidu technology conglomerate, which, together with Alibaba and Tencent, competes for global markets against the most significant North American technology consortiums on the planet—Google, X, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft—all of which have aligned themselves with the conservatism of Republican President Donald Trump in the United States.
Within this context, and drawing on the articulation of the political economy of communication and cultural studies, as well as the notion of platform capitalism, this exploratory study empirically analyzes the processes of appropriation and social uses of self-communication that shape resistance practices on Tik Tok, situated within the global competition for interactions, attention, and data. Quantitative findings are contributed from a study of university students in Mexico.