The cultural customization of TikTok: subaltern migrant workers and their digital cultures

Pandemic inequalities

In April 2020, MCWs were most afflicted by the pandemic. Their “exclusion from national crisis response plans, particularly pandemic preparedness” (Chan and Kuan, 2020: 1) left MCWs without sufficient health and information resources. The inequality faced was tied to poor structural conditions, including cramped and unhygienic dormitory standards and workplace hazards (Dutta, 2021). The lack of pandemic communication tailored for MCWs in the early stages of the pandemic and the state's failure to monitor the outbreak within dormitories fueled confusion and panic (Chan and Kuan, 2020). The living conditions in the dormitories were blamed for the disproportionate infections among MCWs. Challenges with containing the spread of infection caused the prolonged isolation of workers. Containment strategies included quarantining workers on ships and hotels and isolating them within dormitories. As the infection rates declined, mobility restrictions continued, limiting workers to dormitories and worksites. Lifting restrictions for MCWs only regained consideration in November 2021, though in limited numbers (Yufeng, 2021). These measures were in sharp contrast to the rest of the population facing differentiated mobility restrictions (Oh, 2021). The extended lockdowns for MCWs had implications for their mental health (Oh, 2021). Saw et al.’s (2021) study reported increased stress-related symptoms and depression among workers. Those who tested positive for the virus indicated increased anxiety. While in quarantine and isolation, MCWs’ social media presence presented insights into their experiences during the pandemic (Ilyas, 2020; Chua, 2020).

Social media participation

Migrants’ use of social media often includes communicating with social ties, preserving the community and familial networks in the host country, and enabling migrant mobilities (Cabalquinto, 2019). Migrant mobilities refer to how various digital technologies such as social media enable and support migrants through the migratory process in empowering ways. For precarious migrants, owning a smartphone keeps workers connected. The hybrid nature of the technology means accessing smartphones like a computer. The smartphone can sometimes be the only device that digitally connects migrants to social media sites (Dekker and Engbersen, 2014). Studies illuminate how accessing social media sites can enable vulnerable migrants to compensate for informational and communication challenges, assert migrant rights, and bridge power asymmetries to cope with unequal power dynamics (Leurs, 2017). For example, Dekker and Engbersen’s (2014) study reveals how Facebook use provides migrants with discrete knowledge about mobility pathways. Kikkawa et al. (2021) conceptualize migtech as “technology that assists and empower migrants” (2021: 60) to push for rights-centered conditions for migrants. How migrants posture their identities via social media are enactments of their agency in organizing and claiming their rights (Leurs, 2017).

Social media sites act as information intermediaries, negotiating social support, information resources, job matching, and clarifying misinformation (Borkert et al., 2018). For example, closed and public Facebook groups created self-educating spaces and community support (Golan and Babis, 2019). Social media sites can act as information intermediaries that are critical for migrants. Borkert et al.’s (2018) call on migration scholars to study the digital capacities of vulnerable migrants to understand the cultural and communication strategies they employ that enfranchise their navigational and informational capital.

While social media sites can enable empowerment, power differentials continue to exist digitally. Place and Ciszek (2021) posit that digital civic spaces actively prevent subaltern groups from participating in dialog and activism, indicating how power differentials are maintained to exclude marginalized voices. The authors call for theorizing “with and from subaltern communities, critiquing power asymmetries” (2021: 9) by paying attention to sites where subaltern voices are in dialog. Further research on how marginalized populations participate in dialog on user-centered social media applications can challenge mainstream claims that are complicit in erasing subaltern voices and keeping them hyper(in)visible.

Visibility and agency

How certain groups in society are represented, how they are seen, and how often they are seen in the media are shaped by the role of power dynamics in society (Johnson and Boylorn, 2015). Hyper(in)visibility indicates how specific bodies are stereotypically mediated, implicating real-world interactions and treatment (Johnson and Petermon, 2023). Invisibility refers to the erasure of mediated and mainstream representation. It is discussed as a binary to visibility, referring to more significant and complex representations in the media (Johnson and Petermon, 2023). In Singapore, MCWs face violent othering in local mainstream media (Kaur-Gill, 2020). They move in and out of hyper(in)visibility and invisibility, are represented xenophobically, othered for their cultures and habits, and cannot correct these representations through self-advocacy (Kaur, Tan and Dutta, 2016). In the context of their social, economic, and political exclusion, how MCWs produced TikTok content expands our understanding of how they agentically challenged hyper(in)visible constructions of their pandemic experiences. MCWs on TikTok tell us how agentic practices through creative produsage occur on user-centered applications. Adopting Giddens’s (1986) agentic practices referring to resistive acts and processes of negotiation that occur in the context of constraining structural conditions, I study how MCWs’ content revealed agentic engagement in self-representation, challenging hyper(in)visible representations, and sharing pandemic registers on their structural conditions. I draw on Abidin’s (2021) scholarship on visibility labor and social media, capturing how TikTok users self-present and posture to be noticed, prominent, and affectively deemed by their audiences, and Brighenti’s (2010) conceptualization of visibility as a social and political process of negotiating receptivity and recognition, especially among marginalized groups.

Visibility, a defining feature of TikTok (Abidin, 2021), bridges the capacity for invisibilized groups to have a presence, influence, and charter activism (Uldam, 2018). How visibility is performed on the platform includes making information and content easy to locate through hashtags and disseminating content that is affectively perceived (Hautea et al., 2021). Nevertheless, Uldam (2018) posits that social media visibility also presents disempowering scenarios that compromise privacy and enhance surveillance, potentially creating asymmetries in visibilities. Keeping these definitions of visibilities in focus, MCWs’ participation in produsage expanded the imposed and narrow definitions of their migrant identities in Singapore, calling attention to their pandemic conditions and engaging the application for its affordances of visibility to address stereotypes that ordinarily contribute to their hyper(in)visibility and invisibility in local media representations.

Screening accounts

At the next stage, data collection began. The hashtags noted during the observations were narrowed and searched. Hashtags searched were #sg4mw, #sgmigrantworker, #constructionworker, and #sgconstruction. I then combed through the videos to identify MCW profiles based in Singapore. I began coding the accounts to identify migration status. This was often described on profiles or in TikTok videos. I reviewed profiles and videos for labor representation, contexts such as dormitory sites, videos, comments, timelines, captions, music, and original content. Identifying MCW videos included a discussion of their lives as construction workers, and work permits, worksites, and dormitory matters. MCW accounts were only included in my dataset if I could code them as a Singapore-based MCW. I would then map the timeline of videos posted from April 2020 to June 2021. Following that, I would transcribe videos relevant to my search requirements verbatim. Two pandemic timelines relating to the restriction of movement (e.g. quarantine period and dormitory restrictions) for MCWs trimmed the dataset. For example, videos published before March 2020 were not selected because pandemic inequalities for MCWs had not occurred. My final dataset included the accounts of 63 South Asian MCWs with more than 1000 followers. I transcribed and coded a collection of n = 213 short videos. The decision to stop collecting data occurred when codes for emergent themes were repeating and saturating.

Ethics

The ethics of social media gazing for vulnerable populations must be carefully threaded. Therefore, several steps were taken to minimize the risks of covert observation. Data collected were from public accounts with more than 1000 followers. These profiles also adopted visibility features such as hashtags or memetic videos where they interacted with broader TikTok trends such as duets and dance challenges, indicating knowledge of the public nature of the platform. In reporting this dataset, no screengrabs of accounts are displayed. Instead, only transcribed data, observational notes, or texts from videos are used to describe the findings. Videos removed by users are not directly reported in this paper.

Care was taken to ensure publicly accessible accounts of workers were anonymized and decontextualized when reporting the findings. Extracting specific quotes or captions or describing videos from transcribed material ensured workers’ identities were de-identified. De-identifying the data included reporting the data without identifiable hashtags or usernames. The decision to report triggering, sensitive or subversive content was based on locating the user's explicit permission in the comments section to re-share videos or if the video had been published by third-party sources such as the local media. Care was taken to ensure triggering findings reported in this paper had received attention and visibility in a public way.

Data analysis

Visual grounded theory was employed to analyze the dataset. According to Konecki (2011), visual grounded theory constructs theory based “on the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of visual reality” (2011: 152). The approach guides data collection for theory building in visually mediated worlds where we capture objects, space, movement, action, and interactions. Visual grounded theory helps the researcher break down visual datasets for analysis (Konecki, 2011). Video content, filters, captions, hashtags, and comments were analyzed. The visual data and the auxiliary texts and audio elements were open-coded. Every video element was documented for open coding. For example, pandemic videos consisted of open codes such as masks, quarantine, jail, confusion, limited food, extended time, health information, and quarantine information. These open codes were later classified into axial categories such as living conditions. Once all videos, interactive behaviors, and personal field notes were coded, the coding moved to the axial stage. A back-and-forth process of categorizing the codes and sorting them led to the selective coding stage, identifying three themes, (1) Cultural Customization, (2) Expressions of Precarity, and (3) Us and Them: Reclaiming Voice. An example of the coding process is documented for replication in Appendix A, Table 1 and Table 2. The three themes discussed in the paper are described using video transcriptions, captions, hashtags, filters, song lyrics, or audio memes. The decision to present descriptive findings instead of screengrabs was based on keeping the data anonymized.

Cultural customization

MCWs customized the application's editability features to produce videos using their cultural scripts. MCWs customized the filters, graphics, texts, language, songs, and audio from their cultural repositories when producing audio memes, memetic remixing, and lip-syncing. For example, an MCW's TikTok profile had 3952 followers and 25.7 k likes as of July 2021. His following stemmed from the comedic content he was producing. The content produced included elements of his background (Bengali), nationality (Bangladeshi), religious orientation (Muslim), and his labor form (construction worker). The enmeshing of all of these different identities was reflected in his produsage. In his comedic production, the user customizes audio memes using Hindi and Bengali songs, sets the background of his videos at construction and dormitory sites, and adopts dances and dance steps from various South Asian genres. He also plans his upcoming videos based on comments he receives from his audiences, such as: “amazing love the sexy dance idol. Make for me sexy dance for me also [sic].” The user responds to the comments with a new dance performance based on feedback from followers. He configured the application interface to assemble his style of videos, employing original sounds such as South Asian music to match his dance styles. The application was configured to meet his digital consumption and production needs. The use of TikTok involved tailoring the interface from a user-centered perspective, such as adopting scripts in English and Bengali for captions, hashtags, and video titles, stitching snippets of audio from various South Asian movies, songs, and sitcoms. He utilized filters to set the mood and tone for the content, such as “film” or “once upon a time” filter, altering the video aesthetic. Filters were not used for all videos but videos that re-enacted movie or dance sequences. Vizcanio-Verdu and Abidin (2022) share that filters add value in complementing the storytelling practice of the user in an in-group context. This finding similarly reflects how users adopted filters for entertainment content to mimic Bollywood, Kollywood, and Tollywood cinema.

Similarly, another MCW with 34.6 k followers at the time of analysis in July 2021 created videos using his cultural scripts, including comedy, dances, duets, informational, and cooking videos. During the analysis, most of his videos were shot within his dormitory, such as around his bed space, the roof deck, and the communal kitchen. He shares his feelings about his relationship with his mother in Bangladesh in a video. He films himself on a roof deck, stitching it with a famous Bollywood tune referencing parent–child relationships. He then talks about the differences in his lived experiences in Bangladesh, where he was a son cared for by his mother, and compares it to being a migrant laborer, needing to meet his family's expectations of making money. He concludes that it is: “not easy to make money but still I try my best to [reach my dreams] my dream reaching [sic].” This video received 20 comments at the time of analysis that included: “yes bro, we are remittance fighters we proud.” Videos made by MCWs often reflect themes of migrant aspirations. TikTok content reflected their preferences and media consumption diets. The cultural blends through customizability meant that they could select or create audio, content, lyrics, and texts guided by cultural influences and styles.

Comedians, singers, dancers, and lovers

Another user produces comedic content by amalgamating different features through editability. TikTok content can be customized through “the platform's music, and audio library capabilities” (Vizcaíno-Verdú and Abidin, 2022: 886). Content produced by the user included acting out different comedic scenarios. In one video, a worker pretends to accidentally place a gas cylinder on a friend's foot while he is distracted by a phone call. The user edits an intentional Bollywood audio clip to the video. The audio clip is from a well-known Bollywood ghazal, a genre of poetry often dealing with the conflicts of love and lovers, and the emotional pain of falling out with a lover. The user cleverly edits the tune: “ahhhhhh ahhhhhh ahhhhh” from the beginning of the song to create a comedic effect that plays on the idea of pain. In this case, however, the pain is physical, and the tune is intentionally misused for comedic intent. To comprehend the comedic effect, audiences must first be familiar with the audio from the Bollywood movie to understand the hyperbolic intention. He edits the video with a “film” filter, altering the video's color to look like an old film.

In another video, the same user creates a skit that pokes fun at the notion of going viral. Virality is a central aspect of TikTok, prompting visibility and sociality, unlike other social media platforms (Zeng and Kaye, 2022). However, the obscurity of virality makes it impossible to predict and achieve because propriety algorithms guide trending content. Content performance determines virality instead of persona-based fame (Zeng and Kaye, 2022). The video presented a scripted conversation between two MCWs on how to produce viral content on TikTok. It discusses the ambiguity of going viral and begins with an MCW asking another MCW: “brother how do I get a video to go viral?” The MCW then takes off his shirt and starts dancing comedically, stitching it with a Bollywood tune with the lyrics: “My God My God My God.” This can be interpreted as only God knows how to go viral, addressing its ambiguity. As the music plays, it is edited to include the “contagious wheezing laughter ¹ ” audio meme to convey the comedic effect. The hashtag on the video included #viraltiktok.

MCWs produced culturally tailored content such as incorporating slices of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Nepalese, and Arabic music. Comedic videos did not just adopt standard features and effects such as the “contagious wheezing laughter¹” audio meme but customized sound effects and audio snippets from their cultural repositories. Comedic content created also had a specific cultural and contextual appeal, such as content produced within dormitory settings and participating in memetic production. Videos were edited with Indian and Bengali movies, songs, radio shows, and sports matches. For example, an MCW used resources within a dormitory setting to create a scenario where a sports journalist interviews a cricketer. They mimicked the setup and edited an old audio meme of an Indian cricket match to the video: “can't get closer than this what was going through your mind in that last over.” No hashtags were used to propel this video to trend. The video had 14.4 k views, 411 likes, and 14 comments at the time of analysis in July 2021.

How MCWs produced content on TikTok through their vernacular knowledge corroborates with Abidin’s (2021) study on TikTok as a platform with affordances that encourage creative vernacular with its editability features. MCWs assembled their own creative vernacular while using the platform's editability features. Their produsage focused on cultural production that used cultural resources from their regional, national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Videos produced also mimicked broader trends. These included dubsmash videos, duets, dance videos, and collective memefication. Popular content on TikTok used these templates, but MCWs appropriated them in culturally entertaining ways for their audiences. For example, while TikTok often sees popular dance videos such as the “CitiRokk ² ,” MCWs shared versions with different types of music and hashtagged these videos as #dancechallenge. In addition, worker profiles with a following of more than 5 k to 35 k were often found to include dance videos or dramatized videos with scripts taken from South Asian movies. Appropriating the platform's editability interface provided MCWs with an opportunity to creatively express themselves on social media beyond reductive representations (Tan, 2014). These included sharing their identities as comedians, lovers, dancers, and singers.

Expressions of precarity

Besides entertainment produsage, MCWs also shared videos expressing their precarity during the pandemic. Videos reflected MCWs facing chaos and confusion around lockdowns and quarantines, intensive health surveillance, disparities in policies relating to the COVID-19 pandemic for MCWs, and access challenges to healthcare services. They tapped on the element of visibility by showing their precarious conditions in a way discussed by Brigenti (2010) on negotiating recognition of their social conditions. For example, an MCW who more commonly created dance videos for entertainment shared videos to express his precarity during the pandemic. He adopted multimodal elements of the application to show his sentiments while in confinement. He filmed himself standing behind a gate located within his dormitory to curate the effect of being in jail, conveying feelings of entrapment. His video includes captions that address the confinement: “All dormitory became jail coz of covid. im v tired to fight with myself [sic] [crying emojis].” He gazes through the bars and lip-syncs an audio meme of a Bengali song. The audio clip is intentionally chosen from a Bengali movie with a song on prison life. In another example, a video shows a worker attempting suicide standing on the ledge of a dormitory window, where many fellow MCWs looked out of the windows, shouting at the MCW to get off. The captions of the video read: “tonight [anonymize] Indian [anonymized] man want to suicide but people lucky [lucky people are there] to save him [sic].” Even though the video was highly contentious and can be perceived as subversive content by structural actors, it was not removed. In the video's comments section, a journalist asked the user if the video was shareable. The user consented. A second video analyzed also showed another suicide attempt by a worker within dormitory confines. The user removed this video. In the first video, the user employed popular hashtags such as #tiktoksingapore, #singapore, #singaporetiktok, and #foryoupage when posting. The affordances of visibility on TikTok included designing affective content for locatable information for others to view (Hautea et al., 2021). Considering how mainstream media representations erase the visuality of migrant conditions (Kaur-Gill, 2020), MCWs rendered these visuals visible via short videos on the platform. MCW lives are typically hidden, invisible, and hyper(in)visible in physical and mainstream spaces, where they are heavily stereotyped and othered for their cultural habits, contrasted with their production on TikTok. On the platform, they were able to depict the structural conditions of their environments. Kapsch (2022) argues that the production of content and hashtagging videos by marginalized groups are examples of user agency. Marginalized users are agentic when they present their lives for visibility, keeping digital traces in the context of oppression. By making explicit the hidden, invisible, and erased aspects of their marginalized lives, MCWs agentically created registers of their precarity through the affordances of visibility. Self-presenting and posturing for attention, while also adopting visibility to negotiate the social blindness in Singapore, redefines the discursive terrains of self-expression.

Videos shared insight into the intimate details of labor conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Videos included how workers generated COVID-19-related content for distribution to other workers. For example, in another video, a migrant worker comedically tailors an audio clip from a Bollywood movie in Hindi: “oi, put it back on…” edited with a South Asian version of the “contagious wheezing laugher¹” audio meme. The audio meme is stitched with a video clip of the worker taking off his mask and quickly putting it back on. The gist of the video highlights the role of compulsory mask-wearing behaviors in the pandemic. The video was shot within his dormitory. The backdrop of the video featured two cramped bunk beds with worker belongings such as clothes and suitcases strewn on the top bunks. Despite the content highlighting mask-wearing behaviors, the cramped dormitory settings indicate the sharp contrast between workers’ structural conditions that shape health outcomes versus individual responsibility toward pandemic measures.

The content created by MCWs adopted the user-generated application to draw attention to their living and working conditions. Activating storytelling practices that weaved multimodal elements such as audio, filters, captions, and hashtags were reflected. In addition, their content activated and informed other migrant workers, family members, and friends about their lockdown experiences, culminating in comments about the vast disparities faced. For example, followers shared comments such as: “not only the inside workers dormitory, the jail for the outside workers, I have [not been] out for 1 year already [sic]”, “The covid 19 situation has changed Singapore's laws only for workers” were just some of the comments of support.

Videos also pointed to the anxiety and fear of the intense health surveillance they were subjected to, including multiple swab tests. Several videos created by MCWs showed long queues of MCWs lining up at dormitories to participate in swab tests. A particular video was captioned:

“Please god remove this virus from the world [multiple emojis]…10 time today swab test [crying emoji crying emoji] some how many time need to check [prayer emoji prayer emoji].”

This quote refers to the anxiety and stress faced by the user about his plight with intensive medical surveillance. This included a description of numerous swab tests and the confinement faced. He conveys the social conditions by assembling the video with captions and emojis that reflect his mental state. Videos like these point to the health surveillance, entrapment, and (im)mobility as a salient part of MCWs’ COVID-19 pandemic experience. Videos also provided rich graphical insight on workers’ living conditions (details of dormitories), meals, worker interactions, and construction sites making visible their precarity. Finally, videos reflected the trepidation and entrapment felt by workers from the disorder that manifested on the ground. For example, a video showed crowding in a shared dormitory with workers trying to get out, edited with Arabic music containing lyrics referencing the lord. This TikTok video highlighted approximately 100s of MCWs gathered near the exit of the dormitory. Reporting their experiences of confinement and isolation through audio-visual content contributes to a discussion on how migrants are active, agentic actors participating on digital sites in innovative ways, keeping digital records (Syrett and Keles, 2019).

The affordances adopted by MCWs on TikTok activated editability and association features as described by Hautea et al. (2021). This included editing audio memes such as rules, songs, movie clips to images, texts, and videos. For example, TikTok videos on inequalities faced may not have accompanying hashtags. Migrants strategically exploited digital capacities to generate stories about their lives during the pandemic, depending on the content type. Hashtags were commonly utilized for entertainment content compared to other types of content.

Us and them: reclaiming voice

MCWs reflected an understanding of their oppressed position based on the content they produced. Ordinarily, they have limited communicative avenues to speak and organize against their conditions (Dutta, 2021), but on TikTok, MCWs adopted affective strategies to convey their feelings of exclusion. For example, a worker's video displayed billboards of animals placed close to the entrances of a dormitory. The worker captions his video with: “why put animals picture. We are not animal's….” This was edited with a comical Bollywood song and a “contagious wheezing laughter¹” audio meme, conveying a sense of dark humor about their oppressed status. Such videos shared an understanding of the xenophobia and racism faced locally. Goh (2019: 357) notes that the globalized, cosmopolitan city-state is “secured through the attempted exclusion of the workers from society and their segregation from the city that they laboured to build.” MCWs agentically discussed their experiences of exclusion.

Broadly, videos also highlighted dormitory issues concerning COVID-19 rules, reporting the inequalities faced regarding COVID-19 restrictions. A worker captions his video:

“why sg [Singapore] everyday caming [sic] problem? 1. coved19 rules only for dormitory worker 2. have corona in the world but only dormitory worker keep same jeil [sic] 3. Outside people have corona but can go anywhere only can do anything 4. stay dormitory worker same jeil no body think just keep. Flow rules. 5. People think dormitory work animals that's keeping in the [dormitory] dom [sic].”

This video provokes passionate responses in the comments on the jarring inequalities faced by MCWs in the host country. As the pandemic measures slowly eased for the mainstream population, different rules applied to MCWs. They utilized audio clips to complement their videos to emphasize effectively the dehumanizing treatment.

Other examples included videos created to disentangle dominant stereotypes about MCWs via response videos. A video featured a worker responding to Singaporeans addressing them as “mangala,” a local slur often used to describe South Asian workers derogatorily. An MCW explains in response that: “Bangla [referring to the term Mangala] our Mother language” is not an ethnicity or nationality but the language commonly used by MCWs from Bangladesh. The video was of a user directly addressing the hateful comment: “so you need respact [sic].” This video is associated with another video that responds to problematic social conditions for MCWs and existing stereotypes.

Similarly, a worker creates a video responding to social conditions in Singapore that erase workers from accessing recreational institutions. The video was created in response to another comment that xenophobically poked fun at construction and domestic workers: “Bangala always Quee [sic] hotel with Indo and pinay [sic] [referring to Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers] maid's trying true love [laughter emojis].” The video speaks back to the xenophobic video:

“hi bro…Bangala…Bangladesi or Bengali…cannot go hotel 81 ah…what happen to long que… we have money…we need to enjoy…whatever…we can do.. why you jealous bro…don jealous [sic].”

The quote addresses how going to a hotel on their off day is a fundamental right because they have the money to pay for it. The MCW calls out the xenophobic comment. This video is an example of an MCW dispelling stereotypes about MCWs and foreign domestic workers. He humanizes MCWs as having social desires beyond their identities as subaltern workers that should not be merely relegated to construction and dormitory sites.

Videos that responded to the dehumanizing conditions and stereotypical representations indicated how user-generated content-driven applications have the potential to build grassroots-centered voice infrastructures that shape the possibilities of dialog, communication, and reflexivity among subaltern populations. Previous scholarship on the role of social media discussed how MCWs participated in political discourse via social media relating to their home country and adopted the smartphone to connect with social ties (Aricat and Ling 2018). Studies also found how Indian migrant workers culturally appropriated the mobile phone to retain and maintain their cultural identities, yet failed to help them participate and engage in the country's social life (Aricat, 2015), drawing insight on the limits of technology for social inclusion. This paper found that MCWs’ use of TikTok informed how they were speaking against their hyper(in)visibilities via creative audio-visual storytelling, showing hidden sites of their lived experience, and documenting their journeys of precarity through user-generated content on the platform.

While workers created videos to resist the dominant representations, the ethnographic process also detailed how workers were threatened for sharing content about their lived realities. In several instances, videos were removed from their profiles. Dutta’s (2021) study with MCWs similarly documented surveillance strategies on social media sites, including cyber-harassment and intimidation. On TikTok, workers responded directly to these threats via response videos or created ephemeral content, navigating the oppression and silencing of their voice. This included multiple videos coded that were removed.

In one instance, an MCW discusses fasting for religious reasons without social support from facing prolonged isolation. In the video, he shared that he has been in a room for 117 days, breaking fasts by himself. He is dressed in religious attire and stitched somber Bangladeshi music: “fast time alone one room inside 117 day stay. Bro are u can. so sad…” He expresses his feelings of facing extended quarantine despite being COVID-19 negative during Ramadan ³ . This video was re-posted again to show a threatening message he received asking him to remove his video: “Bhaya [brother] people struggling with our job and food, if u not remove this video, I will report it” indicating the surveillance that continues to exist in digital spheres.

MCWs identified the discriminatory treatment regarding COVID-19 pandemic policies and its accompanying rules. Despite facing jarring inequalities, several videos indicated their gratitude to the state for vaccination access. Multiple videos showed them accessing vaccinations with captions such as: “it is vaccination time. proud to be work in Singapore.” Videos of gratefulness share the multiple tensions on the dialectics of worker conditions in Singapore. Where physical borders created vaccination inequality, low-wage transnational migrant workers accessed vaccinations in their host countries and recorded their thankfulness. These dialectical moments of their lived experiences as subjects of mobility through movement and labor and (im)mobility via structural conditions in the host country constitute their experiences of precarity.

Tailoring content

The strategic tailoring of content via TikTok included curating their social conditions through digital storytelling. Workers’ creation and distribution of content on the platform became an avenue to extend digital visibilities in their formats of expression. Scholars have discussed how precarious migrants organizing on new media applications have implications for altering power relations (Leurs, 2017). The customizability of the TikTok application enabled MCWs to edit audio-visual content. The user-supported platform with editability features leverages opportunities for subaltern knowledge production. MCWs manipulated the affordance of TikTok to culturally support audio-visual production, platforming blended content that centered on their sources of knowledge and cultural repositories.

Evident in MCWs’ appropriation of the application is how they expressed details on migrant precarities by culturally customizing the platform's interface. The visuality of their social conditions digitally challenged the bordered peripheralization of their precarity in the offline world. The affordance of ephemerality, language alterations, and audio-visual components made the application especially useful for negotiating their voices for resistance and social change. The ability to control, navigate, and negotiate visibilities selectively was salient. The politics of the digital space as challenging structural surveillance through ephemerality presents opportunities for how user-centered applications can shape online spaces for organizing and activism.

However, ephemerality comes at the cost of visibility and attention. The duality centers on a tension between attention and visibility. The transience and impermanence of videos enable workers to speak about repressive conditions. In a repressive context, appearing and disappearing online may be organizing strategies, challenging the discursive structure. However, workers continued to be “othered” on digital spaces, not gaining similar attention from broader audiences, such as through virality via popular content. Even though some profiles engaged in more common user norms such as collective memefication, dance challenges, and duets, they often failed to trend. No video coded in this study achieved viral status, as defined by Zeng and Kaye (2022). Uldam’s (2018) findings on the asymmetries of visibilities on TikTok are significant in the context of marginalized groups as well. In this study, surveillance of MCW videos contributed to the asymmetries of visibilities. Deleting videos, removing content, or self-censoring implicate visibility and attention outcomes.