ONAUTHORITY - Content Creators on TikTok and the War in Ukraine: Authenticity and Authority in Online Communication

The project focuses on content creators on the social media platform TikTok and their involvement in the communication about the armed conflict in Ukraine.

Empirically, the project is grounded in offline and online ethnographic fieldwork with Czech and Ukrainian content creators and looks at everyday practices, norms, and cultural patterns around the process of content creation.

On a theoretical level, the project proposes to build a conceptual framework for studying the construction of authority on a user-generated content platform, where the notion of authenticity, based on the "being there" experience, plays an important role.

Its overall aim is to map how content creators are building authority and expertise within online communication against the background of geopolitical crisis and a general decline of trust in expert authorities across Europe.

The project will fill a significant gap in knowledge by focusing on the region of Central and Eastern Europe, so far understudied in the field of social media communication and influencer cultures, and bring important, situated knowledge about how local voices are being heard on a global platform during a crisis.

The project is designed as interdisciplinary, combining the methods of digital anthropology with the approach of communication studies.

The project will be conducted at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Miller.

The project also includes a short secondment at Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University, Australia, which will help to contextualize the research in global influencer culture studies.