In-between child's play and teenage pop culture: tweens, TikTok & privacy

Abstract

TikTok's popularity ignites anxieties about youths' privacy on the short-video sharing social media platform. This is especially true for 8-12-year-old 'tweens'. This study draws from in-depth interviews with tweens and their parents to explore perceptions of tweenhood, TikTok and privacy. In our investigation, we move beyond a developmental framework on childhood by taking into account how life stage categories are socio-culturally constructed. The results indicate a dialectical relationship between TikTok and tweenhood: Participants construct TikTok as a liminal networked public that is in-between child's play and teenage pop culture. This dialectical relationship subsequently informs how parents conceptualize and manage tweens' privacy on TikTok. Parents' assumptions about their children's privacy practices, however, do not necessarily match tweens' capabilities to negotiate boundaries between the public and private. Overall, our findings reveal that socio-cultural imaginations of life stage categories and networked publics shape privacy discourses and practices.