prevent any meaningful debate and work against any notion of democratic communication , insisting instead on hierarchical control , then we would expect to find more or less distinct divisions between producers and audiences , and with them a relative absence of creativity , freedom and exploration of ideas and arguments , along with similarly curtailed forms and styles of presentation and structure ( Atton 2004 , 64 ).
Reversely , the creation of a community without closure is based on dialogue and allows users to share their experiences ( ibid , 62 ). Different types of relations to mainstream media are named so there is the question how mainstream discourses are adopted in media products . That phenomenon could be observed at the examination of the British National Party website where Atton found the existence of liquid ideologies . He uses this term to explain that traditional , stable frameworks , if they are political , social or etc ., are dynamic and so liquid ideologies are “ mobile enough to borrow from a variety of discourses in order to present their arguments ” ( ibid , 65 ). The size of media projects is also used to differentiate alternative media . Not only small-scale projects can be categorised in this area , but also large-scale projects that , for example , strengthen and support social movements and actions ( Jeppesen et al . 2014 , 31-32 ). Following the idea that “ these kinds of media deconstruct relations of domination ” ( Jeppesen 2016 , 69 ), the question arises of who claims power against what or whom . From the perspective of far-right media , it needs to be analysed whether any of the agents ( the individual , the community , the post-industrial proletariat or ' the people ', collectively organised ) that Jeppesen categorises for DIY media , community and citizen media , critical media and autonomous and radical media can be used for this example , leaving behind the opposing ideology .
Due to the focus of this research , only some of the areas of tension that will be explored later will be mentioned here , knowing that there are more ways to map alternative media . To get closer to the platform in question , it is worth drawing attention to the working mechanism of TikTok itself and how it can be categorised .
TikTok is an app launched in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance , which allows its users to upload videos of 60 seconds , later extended to 3 minutes ( Masri and Weimann 2021 , 697 ). It grew to half a billion users in 3 years , twice as fast as Facebook . In this way , it became a serious player competing with other social media platforms ( Patel and Binjola 2020 , 2 ). One of the reasons for this success ( Masri and Weimann 2021 , 698 ) is the target of short attention spans , as videos of 15 seconds are the most viral . In terms of user-generated content , which includes everything from funny memes to critical ( political ) issues that anyone can create without any special skills , a wide variety of topics and personal viewpoints can be found here .
It is important to mention the algorithm of the underlying application . Videos are recommended on a user ' s For You page by a personalised ranking that takes into account three dimensions : user interactions such as liked pages and
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