Hypotheses and Insights

Social media and digital production tools have provided a big impulse to the possibility of a democratization
of cultural content production. However, enhanced viability does not imply an actual capacity to tap into
the opportunity. Research on established social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram show that
content production, and especially the most popular contents, is mostly driven by a small elite of super-
users, and an additional but still small share of content creators.

With this dataset, we wonder whether a more recent social media such as TikTok - whose design features are optimized to facilitate individual content production and to enhance visibility of content from unknown users - actually makes a difference in the production of digital cultural content.