“Hearing My People, but Not Seeing My People”: Boundaries of Blackness on TikTok

Social media is a valuable tool that enables Black individuals to contest their racialized experiences and engage in counterpublic discourse. Importantly, this opens up cultural property and closed conversations to out-group visibility and appropriation. With this in mind, I ask: How do Black social media users engage in boundary work on TikTok? I create a typology of boundary enforcement on the platform, identifying nine video subtypes, and analyze each subtype using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis. The findings suggest that Black TikTok users employ various discursive strategies to maintain group boundaries. This study explores how new technologies may impact racialized experiences and identity formation.