Publication
The U.S. government’s January 2025 TikTok ban drove many American users to the Chinese social media RedNote, energizing the ‘TikTok Refugee’ trend. Unlike traditional, affordance-driven online migrations, these users deliberately relocated to an unfamiliar platform with profound cultural barriers to demonstrate political resistance. While the refugee label is often superimposed onto the prosecuted population, American TikTokers voluntarily adopted this label, beckoning us to question its implications for a drastically different population. This paper focuses on the performative construction of the digital identity ‘TikTok Refugee.’ With a qualitative content analysis of 349 multi-media postings, we develop a taxonomy of performances associated with ‘TikTok refugees’ and further examine its embedded cross-cultural dynamics. ‘TikTok refugees’ not only perform as victims, similar to offline refugee narratives, but also as rebels, tourists, and apologizers. They signal how digital activism converges with online migration, repudiating the claim that digital activism lacks sacrifices and effort. However, this adoption also reinscribes the problematic colonial tropes, portraying Americans as heroic explorers engaging with an exoticized Eastern populace with asymmetric power dynamics. We further propose that ‘TikTok Refugee’ is a stylish roleplay, a derivative of ‘identity tourism,’ which risks trivializing genuine refugee exigency, dilutes the seriousness of refugee discourses, and distorts the movement’s political momentum into neoliberal commodification.
NetSI authors
