Cultural Hybridity in TikTok’s Global Expansion: A Case Study of Localized Content Strategies

Abstract

This study investigates the case of TikTok and how it selectively utilises cultural hybridity for content localisation as part of its global expansion. With a comparative case study approach in the US, India, Brazil, and Japan, this research explores how the platform cultivates ‘third spaces’ which fuse global and local cultural influences to innovate expression. Utilizing postcolonial theory, platform theory, and glocalisation, we advance a framework that traces multi-layered cultural dynamics in algorithmically driven ecosystems. These environments, shaped by algorithms, reveal a distinctly multi-layered complexity of cultural dynamics underneath the surface algorithmic order. The results demonstrate three key mechanisms through which TikTok achieves cultural hybridity: algorithmic localisation “cultural fingerprinting,” hierarchical content governance system termed graduated sovereignty, and adaptations within the creator economy tailored to specific countries. The analysis identifies emergent patterns including vernacular cosmopolitanism, algorithmic syncretism, and strategic cultural code-switching. Rather than centring Western cultural impositions as the primary governing lens to impose universally accepted templates, TikTok shows that digital platforms can stimulate rich, diverse encounters instead of enforcing convergence toward a single point. This study introduces refined concepts for the mediated cultural production system in platforms ecosystems while providing guidelines for developers, policymakers, and creators working within and beyond the global digital environment.

The research examines the impact of algorithmic mediation and how it gives rise to “live” cultural friction and subsequently creates new forms of culture which resist the conventional division of global and local in the age of the internet.