‘I feel like I get something else to think about’: How do Australian young people see their relationship with TikTok?

TikTok has become a significant site for youth culture and simultaneously the focus of a moral panic surrounding its impact on young people. The social media platform's content recommendation algorithm has been framed as ‘addictive’, and young people are often imagined as especially vulnerable to its appeal. TikTok has also been criticised for circulating dangerous or extreme content, unsafe for its young audience. However, absent from this debate is the perspective of young users and an understanding of how they conceptualise their agency on the platform. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with 16 young people, most located in Sydney, Australia, exploring what TikTok means to them, and how the platform affordances enable or limit their usage of the app. Our participants offered complex understandings of the platform that acknowledge its pull, as well as the way they pull TikTok towards the relations of care and friendship they thoughtfully mobilise it for. We argue that these accounts call for a rethinking of agency in and from digital platforms as beyond something that these young people either possess or something that resides in the pull of the platform, and instead consider more relational, place-based and collective agential lived experiences.