Filipino content creators brokering migration to Australia on TikTok
Earvin Charles Cabalquinto, Cheryll Ruth Soriano · Continuum · 2025
This article contributes to the growing body of work on brokerage and the organization of transnational mobility by introducing social media content creators – specifically those on TikTok – as emerging forms of digital brokers. While they share similarities with migration agencies/brokers in connecting formal regulatory systems and migration social actors, they also play a distinct role in shaping migrant subjectivities. Through the construction of aspirational narratives and platform-specific practices, these creators, belonging to the category of informal brokers do not directly promote their services; yet they significantly contribute to the crafting of migrant identities that align with the expectations of overseas labour markets or directly promote migration agencies. By foregrounding the affordances of TikTok – its algorithmic visibility, participatory culture and affective modes of engagement – we illustrate how digital platforms mediate contemporary migration imaginaries and pathways. In doing so, we also address the relative paucity of scholarship on the education-migration-social media nexus, particularly in terms of how different actors and relational dynamics co-produce the pathways that facilitate international mobility of students, and migrants more broadly.