Play, Protest, Repeat: Conceptualising Playful Activism on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a central platform in the contemporary social media ecosystem. Existing scholarship recognizes that the increasing entanglement of creative, playful, and political practices on the platform is reshaping modes of political expression and contention. Yet this literature remains largely descriptive, leaving playful activism-defined as the playful adaptation, appropriation, and strategic manipulation of platform affordances for articulating contentious politics-theoretically underdeveloped. This chapter addresses this gap by advancing the first comprehensive framework for conceptualizing playful activism as a distinct form of civic and political engagement. Drawing on an affordance-based perspective, it brings classical play theory into dialogue with social movement scholarship and social media studies to show how emergent repertoires of action, visibility, and collective subjectivity are structured under the platform’s algorithmic logic. The framework is grounded in an analysis of high-impact activist cases from 2022 to 2024 across diverse geopolitical contexts. These cases demonstrate how practices of imitation and play enable new forms of political coordination and solidarity. In doing so, the chapter provides a transferable analytical lens for conceptualizing playful activism as an emergent form of digital political participation in platformized environments.