LOSS OF SENSITIVITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA: THE EXAMPLE OF TIKTOK

Abstract

Since the second half of the 1990s, the internet has become an indispensable part of daily life. In parallel with technological developments, social media channels have emerged since the mid-2000s, and these channels have been integrated with mobile devices. The increase in the accessibility of large masses to these devices has brought about an increase in the number of users of social media channels. These channels not only make communication permanent but also place a visual-based unlimited sense of entertainment at the center of daily life. At the same time, observations reveal that some wrong behaviors and attitudes are exhibited in these channels. One of these wrong behaviors and attitudes is to include disabled people as an element of humor in social media content. Disabled individuals are positioned as subjects in content production, the states, actions, and words of these disabled individuals are used as elements of humor and the recorded images are constantly circulated on social media through applications. This problematic content production is based on motivations such as to be liked, be visible, gather a large number of followers, be posted, be a phenomenon and influencer, provide a financial benefit, etc. on social media channels. The spread of this problematic understanding of content production also includes the danger of normalizing negative attitudes towards people with disabilities and losing sensitivity towards these individuals. In this context, TikTok stands out as one of the social media channels where this kind of negative approach to disabled individuals becomes more visible. This study, which is titled “Loss of Sensitivity in Social Media: The Example of TikTok”, examined how disabled people are positioned as an element of humor in the videos on the TikTok platform. In the study, the descriptive analysis method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. Since the videos uploaded on the TikTok platform can be reposted by many accounts, three videos of each of the disabled individuals named Necip Ağacan, nicknamed Vanlı Necip or Necip Hodja, and Fadime Akkaya, known as Sorgunlu Fadime, were selected through purposive sampling for the sample of the research. The study concluded that disabled people are positioned as an element of humor on the TikTok platform.