Going Viral or Building a Community: The Dynamics of Environmental Activism on TikTok

Abstract

This article presents research on environmental activism on TikTok, focusing on creators on the platform specialized in climate change and sustainability topics. The aim of this research is to understand how eco-influencers navigate the tension between virality and community building, as well as how they understand their audiences. The study draws on an ethnographic approach, based on a sample of 60 accounts of Ibero-American eco-activists on TikTok and an in-depth analysis of 12 TikTok accounts, including interviews with these 12 content creators. Our results show that these creators perceive virality as an intrinsic feature of TikTok and a tool that helps them reach broad audiences. To become viral, they try to engage with ongoing trends on the platform and create videos that are catchy, attractive, and playful. They mainly wish to become viral to reach people who are not familiar with sustainability or climate change issues and change their minds. However, this also means that they feel they are constantly speaking to new audiences and have a harder time building stable and close communities, as opposed to other platforms like Instagram. This research reveals the ongoing negotiation of these eco-activists with TikTok’s affordances and culture, resulting in what we term ‘flat virality’, a circulation logic driven less by shared values and more by algorithmic imperatives, which in turn makes the formation of stable, affective communities more difficult to achieve.

Keywords

TikTok eco-activism virality digital community platform vernacular

Introduction

It is increasingly common to come across short-form videos on TikTok with titles such as ‘Get ready with me to go to COP24’, ‘A realistic day in my life as a climate activist’, or ‘Top 5 hacks to be more sustainable’. These videos are not only examples of digital eco-activism but also show how this activism is reframed through the logics of each social media platform. Digital environmental activism has gained prominence across social media platforms (Hautea et al., 2021; Huber et al., 2022; Lu, 2024), intersecting with influencer culture, giving rise to figures such as the ‘eco-influencer’ (San Cornelio et al., 2021) or the ‘greenfluencer’ (Dekonincka et al., 2026; Knupfer et al., 2023). While previous research has examined how eco-influencers on platforms like Instagram blend personal narratives, activism, and consumption practices (Ardèvol et al., 2021; San Cornelio et al., 2024b), this article shifts the focus towards TikTok eco-activists.

TikTok’s logics differ from other social media platforms: its algorithmic recommendation system, via the ‘For You Page’ (FYP), and the centrality of replicable, trend-based formats impact how these eco-activists shape their content and relate with their audiences. As other digital eco-activists, the creators we analysed also aim to spread awareness around climate change, promote sustainable practices, or foster action. TikTok eco-activists share similar goals, but the ways in which they try to reach their goal are profoundly conditioned by the platform’s affordances and culture, both in content and audience interaction.

This research explores environmental digital activism on TikTok, focusing on tensions between virality and community building, as expressed by our participants. We will examine how these creators adapt their strategies to fit the platform’s vernacular, achieve virality, and reach audiences unfamiliar with sustainable issues. We are interested in how this logic of continuous novelty and addressing new audiences impacts online community building, which has been a cornerstone of digital activism (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Treré, 2018).

Based on a digital ethnography and interviews with creators across Ibero-America, we seek to answer the following research questions:

RQ1. How do eco-activists on TikTok articulate the relationship between virality and community building?

RQ2. How do eco-activists on TikTok understand their audiences and imagine their publics?

This article contributes to discussions on digital activism by examining how TikTok dynamics redefine virality and community. We discuss the implications of environmental activism on a platformed digital environment and the challenges of building long-term engagement for climate awareness. Finally, focusing on Ibero-American creators, we shed light on forms of digital eco-activism rooted in local contexts affected by extractivist practices and environmental degradation, less studied than activism in English-speaking countries.

Literature Review

Early Frameworks for Social Media Activism: Publics, Connective Action, and Community

A significant portion of research on social media activism has drawn on the idea that platforms facilitate the formation of publics and collective action through practices of circulation, coordination, or participation in groups organized around shared topics of interest. Hashtags have been central in mobilizing these publics around specific issues (Gjerald & Eslen-Ziya, 2022; Zulli, 2020). In that sense, social media can enable collective and networked activism by connecting people who express their concerns and thoughts online, even across locations (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-I-Gras, 2022).

A key concept is the notion of ‘connective action’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), describing forms of mobilization in which individuals engage in social causes by exchanging and sharing content through digital social networks, without the need for formal organizations or hierarchical structures. Activism is thus understood as an ecology of participation in which ‘reach’ (the capacity to be seen and re-shared) and ‘ties’ (identification, mutual recognition, continuity of interactions) can align.

The notion of ‘community’ in digital environments has been (and remains) controversial. Early formulations resonate with foundational conceptions of virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993; Wellman & Gulia, 1997), emphasizing relational and participatory dimensions, social bonds, and belonging. However, what more frequently takes shape are networks and constellations of relationships rather than stable communities. In today’s social media ecosystem, ‘community’ can function as a marketing term grounded in a quantified audience (followers, subscribers). We favour the use of ‘community’ as an analytical concept emerging from the field as a folk or emic category to refer to relational issues such as reciprocal interaction, mutual care, and affective proximity (San Cornelio et al., 2024a). A similar distinction applies to ‘virality’: we find creators’ explanations of what ‘the algorithm wants’ or what ‘TikTok demands’ (situated accounts of how the platform works) and also a conceptual dialogue with scholarship on how platforms produce, distribute, and govern visibility (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022; Schellewald, 2022; Siles et al., 2024).

In this regard, it is interesting to bear in mind Bonini and Trere’s work on digital activism. These authors state that the struggle for visibility lies at the centre of digital activism and define a new framework under the term of algorithmic activism (Bonini & Treré, 2024) to highlight the tactics in using algorithms in favour of social causes.

TikTok as a New Environment: Platform Vernacular, Algorithmic Recommendation, and Memetic Imitation

Each social media platform shapes the content that circulates within it by moulding its form, reach, and the nature of user interactions. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as ‘platform vernacular,’ refers to the ‘unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics’ (Gibbs et al., 2015, p. 257) that results in a specific genre of communication for each platform. This vernacular is heavily determined by the affordances of a platform, as they influence user’s understandings of the platform and shape their uses, determining what can be done or not (Boyd, 2010). However, how the users imagine, interpret, and negotiate with such affordances also determines the genres of communication. Therefore, we must understand platform vernacular as a result of both the affordances of the platforms and users’ perceptions and practices (Zhao et al., 2013).

TikTok has two distinctive features: (1) the centrality of the algorithmic recommendation system and (2) content creation driven by imitation and memetic practices.

On TikTok, content is mostly consumed through the FYP, an algorithmically curated feed based on the user’s previous interactions with the videos (Schellewald, 2022). Users, although unaware of the algorithm’s exact workings, are aware of it and negotiate with it constantly (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). This means that TikTok, rather than being structured around follow functions, prioritizes promoting content to broad audiences (Abidin, 2020), so the success of a video depends less on the creator’s popularity than on engaging broad audiences through the platform’s vernacular style (Castellví-Lloveras, 2023; Kaye et al., 2021). This design shifts the balance between reach and relational ties: it expands opportunities for exposure, but it can weaken stable, returning communities.

TikTok encourages easy, accessible content creation and imitation. As Zulli and Zulli (2022, p. 1876) point out, ‘imitation and replication . . . are latent in TikTok’s platform design’. According to them, three main factors determine this imitation at a platform level: the facility of content creation, the centrality of sound or audios, and filters and video effects. And when users imitate videos, it automatically puts the video in conversation with viral videos, amplifying the chances of being visible and viral in the FYP. Hence, the algorithmic structure of the FYP fosters this type of creation, following trends and memes, or remixing existing trends. Memes and humour are also central to TikTok. Memes, often multimodal and audio-based (Cervi & Divon, 2023), amplify the chances of visibility and virality and allow users to adhere to these memes.

These logics of creation and visibility mechanisms impact on the practices of digital activists and how publics and communities are built, which we will explore in the following section.

Activism on TikTok, Volatile Publics, and the (Mis)Alignment Between Virality and Community

A platform’s vernacular can foster certain types of publics and connect users with shared interests or ideas, and the creation of a public or a community is central to many digital activists. From previous literature on digital activism, these groupings could be understood as publics that emerge from practices of tagging, sharing, and recognition. According to Treré (2018), digital platforms play a role in enhancing communication and proselytism and have been fruitfully used for the internal coordination and articulation of contemporary social movements. But on TikTok, the structuring role of following and hashtags is weaker than on other platforms, reshaping how these publics stabilize over time.

Likewise, the success of a video depends on alignment with platform trends rather than the creator’s followers. Activists on TikTok must learn to adapt and participate in the viral trends to be visible. The playfulness of TikTok, which connects with overall playful media practices in the digital era (Ardèvol et al., 2010), gives form to what has been conceptualized as ‘playful activism’, understood as an activism where ‘play and political participation becomes blurred’ (Cervi & Divon, 2023, p. 3). By participating in the platform vernacular, activists can provide political information in a playful, humorous, and light manner (Schoon & Bosch, 2024; Vijay & Gekker, 2021).

Nevertheless, content does not stir away from complicated issues. TikTok can be used to document injustices and process trauma in the Ukrainian war context (Divon & Eriksson Krutrök, 2024), to perform resistance acts by Palestinian users (Cervi & Divon, 2023), or as an anti-racist tool (Schoon & Bosch, 2024; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). Therefore, TikTok activist content can deal with serious issues while being playful. The use of this playfulness also helps them reach broad audiences, even those not interested in political issues.

In climate activism on TikTok, a substantial share of existing research has focused on how narratives are constructed and which types of content generate higher levels of engagement. For example, Huber et al. (2022) note that narratives with a more pronounced emotional charge tend to perform better, and Hautea et al. (2021) describe the emergence of ‘affective publics’ linked to the hypervisibility of non-expert voices.

However, these studies, while valuable for understanding activist communication on TikTok, often bracket a key comparative question: how are the classic categories of digital and social media activism, such as community, reconfigured when visibility depends less on a relatively stable follower network and more on an algorithmic recommendation system? In other words, what happens to the idea of ‘building community’ or ‘mobilizing a public’ when content circulation is driven primarily by the platform rather than by peer-to-peer sharing dynamics?

This highlights that the success of a video depends on the activist/algorithm relationship on TikTok. On other platforms, virality for activists was debated in connection with follower networks, pages, or groups that could sustain continuity over time. On TikTok, exposure to ‘new’ publics tends to be structural, generating massive reach without translating into return, loyalty, or reciprocity.

Kaye, Zeng and Wikstrom (2022) state that young TikTokers’ engagement with climate activism has its unique communicative features, such as the centrality of sound templates and the particular generational Z zeitgeist in terms of ‘circumscribed creativity’ (p. 123–124). The #forClimate activist campaign illustrates a relative ‘sense of community’, as the posts are algorithmically connected posts because they share hashtags. However, these hashtag-driven cases, in terms of community, are weak and subjective, since they are not voluntarily performed, but algorithmically produced.

Towards a Conceptualization of ‘Flat Virality’: Algorithmic Reach Without Relational Depth

Previous approaches to virality include viral marketing, sociolinguistic, or mathematical predictive models. According to Alhabash and McAlister (2015), definitions of virality can be grouped into three main approaches: one focuses on access, spread, and propagation of content in a short period of time (Bonchi et al., 2013); the second defines virality as electronic word-of-mouth, focusing on content sharing (De Bruyn & Lilien, 2004; Eckler & Rodgers, 2014); the third emphasises engagement and argues that users’ behaviours (accessing, liking/disliking, sharing, commenting) collectively qualify engagement as a measure of online ad effectiveness (Tucker, 2011). Nevertheless, on TikTok, these approaches require adjustment: circulation depends on the platform’s recommended distribution, generating massive exposure even without a pre-existing community actively sharing content. Building on this, we develop the notion of ‘flat virality’ to describe a mode of circulation in which reach is maximized (more exposure) while relational depth is reduced (less return, less continuity, less reciprocity), making it harder for communities to sediment. The concept names a feature specific to TikTok (and its imitation by other platforms): mass visibility decoupled from stable ties, with publics forming and dissolving within a continuous flow of recommendations and trends.

At this point, we re-engage earlier frameworks of social media activism (publics, connective action, community) to examine how they are reconfigured under algorithmic recommendation, imitation, and playful participation. First, we identify a discontinuity: on TikTok, conditions enabling reach (virality) may undermine the relational stability required to ‘build community.’ It is this decoupling, rather than the speed of diffusion per se, that we capture with the notion of flat virality.

A second dimension concerns the changing nature of content circulation. Early Web 2.0 virality was strongly associated with practices of remixing and creative appropriation, exemplified by internet memes (Marino, 2015; Shifman, 2013; Soriano Gómez, 2024) and spreadability (Jenkins et al., 2013), since viral content often involved reworking audiovisual materials through spoof, parody, or iterative variation. In fact, debate in marketing and viral advertising focused on understanding why certain pieces of content went viral while others did not, and it was largely attributed to the human action of intentionally sharing, forwarding, or republishing content.

On TikTok (and its subsequent platform derivatives such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts), virality operates differently. We observe widespread imitation through the use of platform‑generated templates, audio tracks, and scripted formats. As a result, virality on TikTok lacks the multilayered contributions of meaning and creativity that characterized earlier forms of participatory culture. Instead, the algorithm plays a central role: watching a video for a few seconds longer is enough to trigger circulation. Consequently, virality becomes flattened, less dependent on human intentionality or creative transformation, and more on algorithmic amplification and behavioural micro‑signals.

Methodology

During the period from February 2024 to February 2025, we conducted a digital ethnography focused on the use of TikTok for disseminating topics related to climate change and sustainability. This research was based on a qualitative and digital approach, combining in-depth interviews with the analysis of TikTok accounts. The primary objective was to examine the digital narratives, strategies, and motivations of independent environmental content creators on TikTok.

Digital ethnography studies specific localities, objects, and events related to digital practices, including online communities, social media platforms, and other digital spaces where social interactions occur and cultural meanings are shared. A central focus of digital ethnography is understanding individuals’ and communities’ points of view, lived experiences, practices, and relationships as they are mediated through digital technologies (Pink et al., 2015). Thus, for our ethnographic fieldwork, we engaged with online communities as participant observers to gather insights into social dynamics and cultural practices and conducted interviews with content creators to gain deeper insights into their experiences and perspectives. For entering the field, we created a TikTok account that allowed us to follow profiles addressing environmental and sustainability topics using relevant hashtags, algorithmic recommendations, and the snowball sampling technique.

While the ethnographic field was constantly open and reshaped, we selected a sample of 60 TikTok accounts to focus in depth based on three specific inclusion criteria to ensure coherence and diversity: geocultural scope, digital reach, and independent agency. The first criteria included accounts that were located in Ibero-America (Spain, Portugal, and Latin America) and that primarily addressed topics such as sustainability, the climate crisis, and environmental education. While acknowledging the significant socio-economic differences between European and Latin American contexts, this selection allows for a transnational analysis of environmental narratives within the Ibero-American digital sphere. The commonality of language (Spanish and Portuguese) and shared cultural references provides a cohesive basis for examining how TikTok’s global algorithmic logic interacts with diverse local environmental challenges. The second criteria establishes that the accounts needed to have at least 1000 followers and a regular posting activity in the last year. And third, we centred our attention on accounts that are managed by individuals who engage in environmental digital activism because of personal motivations, thus excluding brands, institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or international organizations.

The final sample includes 60 TikTok accounts – 18 of them are from Spain, one from Portugal, 37 from six different Latin American countries (Mexico, Panama, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador), and four from transnational collective accounts. In terms of gender, 38 of them are women, 15 are men, and seven of the accounts are managed by more than one person. Fieldwork involved a persistent effort to engage with creators in a highly volatile digital environment. Of the 33 influencers contacted, 12 agreed to participate, providing a robust corpus of qualitative data. These interviewees were six creators from Mexico, four from Spain, one from Brazil, and one from Panama. Regarding the gender distribution of these young activists, nine identify as women, two as men, and one is a collective account (comprising both men and women). Besides TikTok, all of our participants are active on at least another social media platform, mostly Instagram or Facebook. In terms of their professional occupation, two of them work exclusively as digital content creators, and the rest of them combine their activity on social media with other jobs. Specifically, three of them run a business or shop of sustainable products; two of them work as environmental educators; one of them is a teacher; one of them works in recycling; and one of them is formed by a collective of people who hold different jobs. Most of our participants can be understood as ‘microinfluencers’, as they have less than 1000–100,000 followers. We focused on these 12 TikTok accounts through weekly monitoring and documenting insights in a shared research diary, where we recorded detailed field notes on content trends, creator–audience interactions, screenshots, and video recordings of the most representative posts, specifically focusing on the engagement metrics and the qualitative nature of follower reactions (comments, duets, and shares). This observational data served to triangulate the findings from the interviews.

Interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams following the approval of the institutional Ethics Committee (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and in alignment with the ethical flexibility advocated by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Informed consent was obtained orally and recorded on video. This approach was chosen to suit the digital nature of the interaction and to respect the participants’ agency as public activists, all of whom explicitly opted to be identified by their real names or their account usernames.

During the interviews, participants were asked about origins and motivation, perceptions of TikTok and other social networks, creative process, relationship with the audience and other actors, future and expectations, and opinions on activism on TikTok. Data analysis was performed via Atlas.ti through an iterative inductive approach. This involved an initial descriptive coding stage based on the interview questions, followed by a second stage of thematic clustering using Atlas.ti’s Code Groups and Network tools to align the findings with the analytical objectives of the study. Concretely, this article focuses on the core categories that emerged from the network analysis that directly address the tension between virality and community building.

Results

Finding the Formula for Viral Success

A primary finding emerging from the ethnographic fieldwork is the perceived dichotomy between virality and community. While the analysis suggests these phenomena are inherently interconnected rather than diametrically opposed, participants conceptualize them as a significant tension. Specifically, creators associate TikTok with transient virality, contrasting it with platforms like Instagram, where they feel able to sustain a more committed community. This ‘sense of affection and relatedness’, characterized by audience loyalty and active response, is perceived as more elusive on TikTok, leading to an ongoing struggle between cultivating deep engagement and chasing broad reach.

When we asked why they joined TikTok, most participants highlighted its potential for virality. For example, Spanish creator Biosferízate joined TikTok during the pandemic because ‘I saw how TikTok was growing, people were posting videos, and they were quickly becoming viral, and I thought “I have to do it”’. Similarly, the Mexican collective account Ecocrítica told us that ‘I think TikTok is a little more convenient [than Instagram] because you can get quick views, right? You upload a video and if people are interested, you quickly get views’. Thus, for these eco-activists, big visibility and virality are one of the main enticements of TikTok.

Many of them recalled the surprise of going viral early on TikTok, highlighting its rapid visibility compared to Instagram’s slower growth. For instance, Susana Morteo posted a video about a biodegradable toothbrush, and she was stunned to see ‘how the video had millions of views, it was shared a lot . . . A huge virality’. This virality was often mentioned as something that happened overnight. Morteo and the other participants understand virality as the possibility to reach a wide audience and get the ‘golden ticket’ (Abidin, 2020), something that they saw as a defining trait of TikTok.

There was a shared sense that the platform’s algorithm plays a crucial role in making content go viral. Mexican creator Random Rojo mentions luck and the algorithm as the two main factors in determining if a video will be successful: ‘in the case that a video is seen by many people or even becomes viral, that often depends on luck and the algorithm . . . on TikTok, it’s the algorithm who does the job’. Similarly, Panamanian eco-activist Camila Aybar mentions that TikTok’s algorithm ‘benefits reach’ with the goal of ‘showing your video to as many phones and feeds as possible’.

However, even though they clearly stated that the algorithm was responsible for achieving virality, they also had a hard time understanding what exactly makes a video go viral. Many of them shared feelings of confusion because they felt they could not really understand what the key to the success of the video was. As Ecocrítica puts it:

[The algorithm] it’s something that I haven’t quite grasped yet. I can’t control if one video will be a hit and another one won’t, right? Because sometimes I put a lot of care and dedication to a video and it doesn’t hit, and then, some images in a meme format on TikTok, they get 80.000 views and 70.000 likes . . . So, I feel it’s out of my control.

Random Rojo shared a very similar experience:

Some people will put a lot of effort into a video, lots of work, time and even money . . . and then the video has 200 views. And then you record a video before getting into a shower because you have seen something interesting and you only have 15 minutes to do it, and you can get 3 million views.

TikTok has its own programmes for content creators devoted to environmental advocacy. This is the case of ‘Creadores del mañana’ [Creators of tomorrow] (aimed at Latin American creators), which many of our participants have joined in their different editions. In these educational programmes, the platform teaches creators how to produce videos that are likely to be spread. Even though they had participated in these programmes, they still felt they could not understand what makes a video become viral.

Thus, they consider the algorithm as the key driver of virality, although its workings remained opaque. This is a perception common across platforms (Nieborg & Poell, 2018), and our participants expressed frustration when carefully crafted videos underperformed while spontaneous ones went viral, an aspect that made them feel ambivalent, as they valued and questioned it at the same time.

Our participants also felt pressured to post constantly, fearing that irregular activity would reduce visibility. Una Reciclada, from Mexico, told us that ‘it doesn’t matter if you have a very important message to share, if you don’t post for a few days, then it’s done, you don’t have a lot of reach’. This made them feel uneasy, especially considering that the type of content they produce requires substantial research time, and they often struggle to keep up with TikTok’s constant and fast-paced content demands, as most of them are not full-time creators and have other jobs.

Some creators tried to follow a regular schedule, but others decided not to play by its rules and stick to the time they felt they needed to create videos, as Spanish creator Abbey C told us:

You know how the algorithm is, it demands a lot of content. But with the dissemination of environmental content, I don’t think it’s possible, because you need to do research, write the script, go record to a specific place . . . My content can’t be created in a fast and easy way, you know? Recording and posting three videos a week, as the algorithm wants . . . No, I can’t.

This reflection by Abbey C leads us to another key factor linked to virality that our participants perceived, which is that they believe that TikTok rewards content that feels spontaneous, natural, and unplanned. This was also a key difference compared with other platforms, like Instagram, which they felt rewarded more elaborated content: ‘On Instagram, everything must be aesthetic, very prepared and planned. TikTok, on the other hand, is more organic and simpler’ (Una Reciclada).

Based on their experiences with which content works better than others, most participants ended up with similar conclusions: spontaneous and catchy videos with clear ideas are more likely to become viral. Being able to capture the attention of the viewer in the first seconds of the video was mentioned by several participants as a key factor to achieve visibility and virality, as Blondiemuser puts it ‘if the first two seconds of the video have gone by and you haven’t told anything, people leave’ or, in Menina Das Vassouras’ words, ‘the most important thing in a video it’s the beginning, drawing people’s attention’.

The mix of spontaneity and the need to capture people’s attention was seen with ambiguous feelings. On one hand, it was positive, as it meant that creating videos was a simple process. Camila Aybar reflected on the differences between Instagram and TikTok in terms of effort put into the content: ‘creating content on TikTok is way easier than creating content on Instagram . . . If I’m walking down the street and I see some trash, I can record myself and post instantly on TikTok. Instagram requires more’. On the other hand, it also meant that creators had to learn the TikTok format and adapt to it, shaping their narrative style to what they felt TikTok demanded. For some of them, this was an opportunity to improve their content creation, like Alejandra Ramos:

When I started, TikTok didn’t let you post videos longer than one minute. And that was good, because it makes you be concise, it’s an interesting exercise to polish yourself, to improve your narrative.

For others, they felt they were not able to adapt to its format. Usar y Reusar told us that: ‘the video I posted yesterday was only seen by 6 people . . . But I’m not frustrated, because I don’t understand TikTok’s language’. So, even though she identified that TikTok required a certain format of videos to achieve visibility and virality, she felt she was not able to understand it and create videos accordingly.

One of the key ways of fitting into TikTok style was engaging with its trends and memes, which connects with TikTok’s vernacular, imitation, and memetic culture (Zulli & Zulli, 2022). Therefore, despite some initial reluctance to engage with trends, most of them ended up incorporating TikTok viral trends in their climate videos. Biosferízate saw trends as a way to discuss scientific content in a light and catchy way:

I saw ‘Tops’ on TikTok, people doing ‘Top 10 U2 songs’, and so on. I hadn’t posted in a while and I said ‘Look, what’s popular on TikTok are clear ideas’. So, I did a ‘Top 10 seagulls I got to see in Galicia’. And the video had a pretty good impact, and I thought that it was a good way to put dense content on TikTok, so I did the top 5 enzymes, top cell organelles, top cetaceans . . . I liked taking an idea that is succeeding and using its virality, its formula, to put informative and educative content.

These perceived TikTok demands to achieve virality – engaging, catchy, regular, and spontaneous content – have an impact on the way these creators engage with their audiences and the possibilities of building a community of followers, which we will see in the next section.

Reaching New Audiences and Building a Community

Behind the desire to be viral lies the desire to reach as many people as possible with their messages about the climate crisis or sustainability content. In that sense, our participants are willing to adapt to the language of TikTok and its demands if that means reaching as many people as possible. Instead of staying on one TikTok ‘side’ (Maddox & Gill, 2023), the eco-activists of our sample wanted to get to mainstream audiences. Thus, trying to keep the content accessible was important to them, as they aspire to reach people who care about the environment and the climate crisis, but mostly, they want to get to people who are not particularly interested about it.

For instance, Una Reciclada talked about her desired audience in these terms: ‘my videos are directed towards people who don’t have this type of knowledge, because often we don’t care about the climate not due to indifference, but to lack of knowledge’. Many of them mentioned aiming at people with little knowledge or interest in environmental issues. To reach them, besides following TikTok trends, they believed their content had to be easy to understand and very clear. Blondiemuser told us that she always had in mind her grandmother when creating the videos: ‘I make videos that my grandma can understand. Simple videos so everyone can learn’.

They clearly had an educational purpose, coincident to other environmental creators on Instagram (San Cornelio et al., 2024a). For them, educating their audiences meant achieving two outcomes: sharing and disseminating complicated scientific or environmental knowledge and fostering critical thinking. Many of them highlighted the potential of TikTok to share knowledge about climate change, which might be challenging to understand or even complicated for mainstream audiences. For instance, Una Reciclada told us that for her videos, she read scientific papers and reports and then ‘I break them down into plain words so us mortals can get it’. Others mentioned their aim to foster critical thinking and encourage their audiences to keep learning and reading. This is the case of Susana Morteo, who told us that,

I enjoy encouraging critical thinking. I think it’s important for us to learn how to ask questions, and how to question things ourselves. Personally, I don’t like just giving out information as I have the final word. Sure, I have information, but I always try to share it along with the scientific article or book where I got it from, so that you can keep exploring and researching on your own.

In both cases, reaching broad publics is key to foster critical thinking or to disseminate scientific knowledge. Therefore, being viral is seen as the best way to reach broad publics and having the chance to reach someone who might see them on the For You Page that otherwise might never find them. However, this has two relevant consequences. The first consequence is that publics on TikTok are not as stable, loyal, and close as they are on other social media platforms. The second consequence is the exposure to undesired audiences, which often can become ‘haters’ or post hurtful and malicious comments.

First, our participants felt it was very complicated to build a community on TikTok. Ecocrítica sums up the way many of our participants felt regarding their audiences:

On TikTok the public is more volatile. People can like our videos, they’re even interested, maybe they comment, but they don’t follow us. Their activity with us ends there. On Instagram and Facebook [the audience] is more loyal.

Communities, formed by both followers of the accounts and other environmental content creators, are a pillar in Instagram activism (Hannouch & Milstein, 2025), constituting an informal network of environmental advocates. In other words, content creators are committed to the community, and the community helps them to sustain their activism (San Cornelio et al., 2024a).

Communities are shaped more by sustained micro-interactions than by view counts: answering questions not only in comment threads but also through direct messages, correcting misinformation, recognizing returning viewers, and, occasionally, moving conversations to more personal channels. As Menina das Vasouras put it, building community requires consistency: people get used to seeing you, and through that process, they grow fond of you, and vice versa. However, for most participants, this kind of relationship is difficult to scale on TikTok. Susana Morteo notes:

On TikTok what you post gets amplified, videos get viral very quickly. But there’s not community. Just as content is seen, so it is forgotten, and the next one comes and so on, because TikTok format is like this.

All interviewees maintain active accounts across different platforms, most commonly Instagram, which they describe as more suitable for building stronger ties through continuity and interaction. Biosferízate, for instance, emphasized Instagram stories, polls, Q&As, and direct messages to make it easier to ‘get to know people’ and to recognize those who return. Susana Morteo framed it in terms of stability, as her Instagram community pays attention when she shares something. This shift is not only technical but also affective. Several creators described their Instagram communities as kind, caring spaces, ‘very friendly, very pleasant’ (Blondiemuser) or even ‘very loving’ (Usar y Reusar), which reinforces the idea that community cannot be reduced to a quantifiable audience but involves ties, recognition, and a certain affective proximity.

By contrast, TikTok is primarily understood as a space for maximizing reach and connecting with unfamiliar, mainstream audiences. While creators do not expect to build community there, they maintain a presence because TikTok functions as a powerful megaphone for climate awareness and education.

This leads us to the second consequence we mentioned: the appearance of people not initially targeted as their audiences, which includes haters and can result in hostility in their comments. Most of them agreed to qualify TikTok as a hostile or violent platform, in which receiving hateful comments was quite common. As Camila Aybar puts it, ‘it’s an algorithm that’s put on the cell phone and in the feed of people who don’t know you, don’t have a fucking clue who you are, it’s a platform more prone to haters’. Therefore, they believed that being exposed to these comments was rooted in TikTok’s design, mainly through the discovery features of the For You Page.

Discussion: Flattering Virality and Strengthening Community

The previous reflections of our participants express distinctive elements that are specific to the TikTok platform and its audiences, which condition their activism. Our content creators have some points in common with other types of activism, like digital feminist activism (Caldeira, 2024) or with eco-influencers on Instagram (Shabir, 2020). Our analysis shows that their activism is heavily determined by both TikTok’s affordances (virality, algorithmic recommendation) and vernacular culture that is created on the platform (informal, fun, playful).

Our findings elicit a tension experienced by our participants: being viral or building a community. These ideas emerge strongly in our interviews and are a central friction of their activism and practice as content creators, yet remain underexplored in social media activism research. On one hand, ‘community’ remains insufficiently defined, as it is often loosely invoked, conflated with terms like publics (Hautea et al., 2021) or adopted from platform framings. On the other hand, virality has been conceptualized in TikTok in quantitative terms, as views or likes, or in relation to the formal characteristics of the videos and the speed of diffusion (Wang et al., 2023). This contrasts with some statements from our participants, which constantly refer to a high level of agency to the platform, with expressions such as ‘TikTok wants’, ‘TikTok knows’, or ‘the algorithm asks’, thus perceiving that contents quickly spread are also conditioned by the algorithm performance.

Although TikTok’s algorithm remains opaque, Grandinetti and Bruinsma (2023) show that it actively promotes controversial or political content, even without engagement, to drive interaction. This intentional distribution strategy helps explain why creators seeking virality often encounter hostile or non-desired audiences.

Participants articulate the virality/community tension through both TikTok’s affordances and its platform culture. In terms of content types, they note that informative or general content tends to foster virality, while more personal content strengthens community ties. In addition, achieving virality involves other factors, such as producing ‘striking’ content (often not highly polished, as Abbey C points out), maintaining a kind tone, and using simple formats, such as rankings or lists.

Virality, according to our participants, is epitomised by the idea that ‘a video spreads like wildfire’, differing from earlier definitions of virality, such as those implicit in meme culture, where virality involves creative elaboration on media content and meaning. Thus, we tentatively describe it as a ‘flat virality’ that favours fast consumption over participatory engagement.

In our study, TikTok virality includes elements of previous theoretical models but is primarily characterized by access, as content circulation is largely driven by the platform rather than by user communities. This aligns with Venturini’s (2022) assertion that virality is not an emergent outcome of user interactions but is systematically produced and regulated by platforms to intensify engagement, sustain user attention, and ultimately generate economic value (Soriano, 2024, p. 267).

In this context, creators attempt to accommodate the algorithm by adopting specific content formats that enhance accessibility; however, they ultimately lack control over the mechanisms of promotion. Notably, they conceptualize virality as a means to reach mainstream audiences, an objective that often appears disconnected from, and even in tension with, their more personal and relational notion of community. Virality is connected to mainstream publics and consequently opposed to community building.

While some scholars argue that activist and politically engaged groups can strategically mobilize community-driven challenges to influence TikTok’s algorithm (Issar, 2024), these represent one-time or event-based actions. In contrast, community-based activism, often activated through the sharing of personal content and reciprocal engagement with followers, offers a sustained, everyday communication, aimed at message dissemination (San Cornelio et al., 2024b), building a solid base, which aligns with our participants’ practices. Their understanding of community resonates with earlier conceptions of virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993), emphasizing relational and participatory dimensions, social bonds, and a sense of belonging. These notions were somewhat overshadowed by the advent of social media (and web 2.0), where ‘community’ came to signify a quantifiable audience of followers or friends, often leveraged for economic purposes. In the context of TikTok academic research, this is the predominant approach, as we have detailed previously.

Conclusion

This article examined how environmental activism is reconfigured on TikTok by focusing on the tension between virality and community building. Our findings suggest that digital communities remain relevant, in line with previous research: Treré (2018) recognizes the role of digital media as spaces of creativity and for the dissemination of symbolic and emotional aspects that contribute to social movements’ organization, strength, and identity.

However, TikTok combines broad algorithmic reach and virality but offers limited possibilities for sustained communities and long-term bonds. Our findings also highlight the relevance of transplatform activism, showing that activism on TikTok cannot be detached and isolated from the wider platform ecosystem in which it is embedded. Although algorithmic activism enables visibility and message diffusion through platform logics, our findings stress the need to situate these practices within broader digital activism research and a transplatform perspective. On TikTok, community is largely reconfigured through algorithmic recommendation and consumption-based publics that are diffuse, ephemeral, and weakly anchored in belonging or shared identity, aligning with Boyd’s (2010) notion of networked publics rather than earlier definitions of virtual community (Wellman & Gulia, 1997). Nevertheless, creators continue to conceptualize community in affective terms, emphasizing care, emotional safety, and reciprocity. From this creator-centred perspective, future research should examine how users themselves understand and make sense of community building on TikTok.

Finally, the concept of flat virality enables a broader reflection on platform culture, participatory media, and, overall, digital activism. TikTok exemplifies a shift from earlier digital cultures’ participatory paradigm, where activism was closely linked to practices of remixing, cocreation, or overall playful engagement with media, resulting in a wide spectrum of creative and political engagements (Roig et al., 2009). Flat virality results in more reach but less relational depth and less user agency. This means that activist practices are rooted in participatory culture and transformed, and we must rethink media practices under algorithmic centrality. By foregrounding flat virality, this article contributes to theorizing and understanding the rupture of digital activist practices and community understandings on digital platforms.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Ona Anglada-Pujol

Gemma San Cornelio

Elisenda Ardèvol

Sandra Martorell

Informed consent statements

Informed consent was obtained verbally before participation and audio-recorded before the start of the interview in the presence of a witness. All participants explicitly consented to the publication of their names and usernames. Participants were informed of their right to withdraw at any point without consequences.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by the grant PID2024-159564NB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE, and the grant 2021-SGR-01476 funded by the Department of Research and Universities of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Ona Anglada-Pujol is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Library and Information Sciences and Audiovisual Communication from Universitat de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain). She holds a PhD in Communication from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and is a member of the Medium research group at the same university. Her research interests include digital and popular culture, queer studies, and fan and gamer cultures.

Gemma San Cornelio is a Full Professor at the Information and Communication Studies Department, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has published a number of papers on creativity, visual culture, identity, and environmental activism in new media. She is currently the Dean of the Information and Communication Sciences Department and coordinator of the Mediaccions Research Group. She participates in different funded research projects.

Elisenda Ardèvol is a Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Arts and Humanities Department at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Researcher on visual, digital, and media anthropology, focused on ethnography and qualitative methodologies innovation. She is also a Guest Professor at the Department of Anthropology, History and Humanities of Flacso, Ecuador, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Digital Ethnography at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, and at the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.

Sandra Martorell is a researcher and Associate Professor in the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation, and Art History at the Universitat Politècnica de València. Her research interests primarily focus on communication and visual culture, and she has published in various academic journals and collective volumes addressing the relationship between social media, digital platforms, and contemporary visual practices. Over the years, her work has explored how images circulate, acquire meaning, and shape public discourse in the digital age. More recently, she has turned her attention to environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on visual econarratives and the role of imagery in shaping ecological awareness. Her current research delves into the aesthetics and politics of environmental communication, especially in the context of social media activism and emerging grassroots narratives.

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