Special issue introduction: reflecting on TikTok creators and digital economies

From global trends to record-breaking growth, TikTok provides new playgrounds for popular culture, low barrier participation in public life, and new forces of creator labour that are reshaping cultural trade and economic life. TikTok’s popularity and platform architecture heightens tensions between commodification and creativity, visibility and voice, performativity and authenticity. This special issue addresses these tensions by focusing on creator practices, identities, and communities and their ‘digital economies’ which have come to stand for the production, circulation, and exchange of cultural, affective, and symbolic goods. The articles that follow were curated through a global symposium on TikTok Creators and Digital Economies, held in October 2023 as a satellite event of the TikTok Research Cultures Network and the Digital Cultures and Economies Research Hub. This introduction offers a reflective review of the current state of research on creators and digital economies. We argue that TikTok is a complex entity, at once an app, company, market, community, and a cultural producer of cultural producers. While creator visibility is prioritized over voice, and monetization over recognition, TikTok’s digital economies includes many parallel economies – such as affective, creative, platform – and we must now centre meaning making alongside money-making, exchange, and values.