This study examines how TikTok’s functional affordances transformed into political affordances during the 2022–2023 protests against Dina Boluarte in Peru. In a context of state repression and media control, TikTok emerged as a vital space for symbolic resistance, where citizens—particularly young content creators—disputed official narratives that criminalized protests.

Drawing on digital everyday politics and relational affordance theory, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, including a technical walkthrough of TikTok, content analysis of 286 videos, and interviews with eight content creators. Findings reveal two key political affordances: testimoniability and propagability.

Testimoniability emerged as users leveraged TikTok’s immediacy and editing tools to document repression in real-time, countering state narratives. Protesters became citizen reporters, combining firsthand footage with expressive tools like filters, subtitles, and music to construct alternative accounts of police violence. Meanwhile, propagability arose as TikTok’s algorithm allowed dissident content to reach wider audiences beyond traditional media’s gatekeeping. Creators repurposed TikTok’s viral culture to expose state abuses and mobilize digital activism.

These findings demonstrate that affordances are not fixed but dynamically reconfigured in response to political urgencies. TikTok’s technical possibilities were reshaped by protestors’ communicative needs, turning the platform into a space for contestation and resistance. By highlighting how marginalized voices use digital tools to challenge repression, this study contributes to broader discussions on platform politics and social movements in the Global South.

Since November 2024, Serbia has witnessed widespread protests led by university students following the Novi Sad railway station disaster. Initially demanding government accountability, the movement has evolved into a nationwide call for political change. This study qualitatively analyzes TikTok content related to these protests, focusing on the intersection of music, memory, and digital activism.

TikTok, with its algorithmic affordances, amplifies this relationship, facilitating the circulation of protest messages through music-based participation (Medina Serrano et al. 2020; Boccia Artieri et al. 2022).

Employing digital ethnography and qualitative content analysis, the research explores how three key songs (originating from distinct serbian historical periods: 1986, 2003, and 2024) shape protest narratives.

Beyond mobilization, music functions as a framing device, encoding protests with emotional and historical significance while maximizing algorithmic visibility.

This study highlights the adaptability of digital activism, as protests extend into gaming platforms. Though seemingly ephemeral, these actions, documented and shared on TikTok, produce memories of activism (Chidgey and Garde-Hansen 2024) and reflect new participation modes.

Finally, the continued resonance of Yugoslav-era songs challenges nationalist narratives seeking to erase this cultural heritage (Simeunović Bajić 2012). Their presence in contemporary protests shows how Yugoslav cultural memory remains a transgenerational and transnational resource for articulating dissent and solidarity.

This paper examines how Muslim young women in the Bangsamoro, Philippines use TikTok to build everyday peace and amplify their agency in peacebuilding, alongside institutional peace processes that often exclude them. It examines how their engagement on TikTok shapes their identities and contributes to reshaping narratives about Muslim young women’s roles in society. By combining social media analysis with kwentuhan (talk-story), the paper demonstrated how Muslim young women use TikTok’s unique platform features—such as sound, text, trends, and performative elements like gestures and body language—to engage in peacebuilding. Using Cervi and Divon’s (2023) framework and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2023), the paper identifies key communicative practices, platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015), and interactions among young women leaders on TikTok. The findings reveal that (1) peacebuilding is an embodied practice for these young women, facilitated by the platform's features; (2) they use travel vlogging and geotagging to highlight places as sites of political struggle; and (3) they leverage TikTok to create spaces for dialogue, educating, bridging differences, and addressing societal issues. This paper highlights how TikTok becomes a space where Muslim young women challenge traditional, institutionalized notions of peacebuilding, reimagining it as an embodied, intimate, and relational practice through the creative use of TikTok dialect.

The French National Rally's 2024 legislative campaign is an example of how political parties strategically leverage new media, to reconfigure political engagement especially among younger demographics. This study investigates the role of TikTok in political communication strategies during the 2024 French legislative campaign, with a particular focus on how the National Rally is reshaping its image through specific communicative approaches. Grounded in theories of politainment, political personalization, and pop politics, this research examines how the communication strategies of Jordan Bardella, Gabriel Attal (Renaissance), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise) engage with pop culture, highlighting both their divergences and points of convergence. The study employs audiovisual content analysis on 131 TikTok videos produced by these political actors during the campaign. The analysis examines how TikTok's affordances are leveraged, including the use of viral sounds, meme-based engagement, and informal storytelling. It also explores several key dimensions to understand the interaction between pop culture and political communication. Findings suggest Bardella’s use of TikTok aligns closely with the logic of politainment, effectively merging traditional party values with contemporary digital communication practices. Unlike Attal and Mélenchon, whose strategies remain more traditional, Bardella leverages pop culture references, informal aesthetics, and emotional appeal to establish a relatable and community-oriented political presence. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on social media politainment by illustrating how TikTok redefines political interaction. Future research could explore cross-national comparisons to better understand how political leaders interpret and model political interaction with new generations.