Challenging (platformisation) invisibilities through humour: The Paralympics, TikTok and social change?

Abstract

The penetration of social media platforms in the cultural production and consumption circuits of sport mega-events means that organisations like the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) are afforded new and alternative channels to engage with their audiences. TikTok, one of the largest platforms, is characterised by a higher degree of playfulness and humorous content and has been used to mobilise audiences for prosocial political aims. Using TikTok’s Research API access, this article relies on automatically collected metadata from all IPC posts between May 2023 and May 2024. After consolidating and manipulating the data through Python, statistical analyses were performed on SPSS to understand how certain content becomes more visible on the platform. In a second stage, videos with most virality underwent visual discourse analysis. We hold that the IPC, to challenge invisibilities, arguably one of the biggest obstacles for disability sport, engages in the circulation of humorous content with the aim of promoting inclusion and social change for persons with disabilities. While TikTok and the circulation of humorous content afford the IPC wider visibility to new audiences, it might provoke unintended consequences through further stigmatisation of disability sport as non-serious activity.