How Civil are Comments on TikTok's Educational Videos? Insights for Learning at Scale
Ha Nguyen, Morgan Diederich · 2023
Social networking sites present opportunities for informal learning at scale. Researchers have explored the use of TikTok, a site for sharing short-formed videos, for informal and formal learning. As we consider the learning potential of sites like TikTok, it is equally important to investigate features that may discourage learning. Our work examines the pervasiveness of incivility, or offensive language targeting individuals and ideas, in videos categorized with educational hashtags on TikTok. We collect a corpus of 346,626 TikTok comments, and find a small percentage (1.5%) with uncivil content that might turn someone away from the discussion. To understand participation patterns, we compare comment threads in videos with the highest average incivility to the rest of the corpus. These comment threads generally have earlier appearance of uncivil content, lower participation from video creators, and less unique participation from different users. Findings have implications for content moderation in online discussions, to deprioritize uncivil content and encourage facilitation from content creators.