Exploring children’s TikTok cultures in India: Negotiating access, uses, and experiences under restrictive parental mediation

Abstract

TikTok is a popular platform allowing users to view and make short videos. The platform's embeddedness among youth cultures is key to TikTok’s commercial success, to attract and sustain a diverse array of international users. The discourse around children and social media especially TikTok is laced with technopanics, as is the case in India. Although sparse, literature shows children in India want to explore social media but parental mediation usually follows a restrictive style. Using a qualitative approach and multimodal methods, we unpack how children (10–18 years) in a large Indian metropolitan city use TikTok for self-presentation and creative expression while navigating restrictive parental mediation. This article helps gain in-depth understanding of children’s TikTok cultures in India by foregrounding their voices and contributes to larger scholarship on youth digital cultures by focusing on their: (a) vernacular cultures on TikTok, (b) deliberations on safety and wellbeing, and (c) negotiations regarding agency and resistance.