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

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.