“Put a Finger Down, Fanfic Edition!”: Fanfiction Participants on TikTok and Anonymity Collapse

This study explores the self-presentation of users on the short-form, video-based social media platform TikTok. As TikTok has grown in popularity among young women, it has increasingly been utilized by a community of young, primarily female, fanfiction participants. Qualitative content analysis of 150 fanfiction-related videos from the TikTok For You Page, a personalized, algorithm-curated feed, showed that almost 1 in 2 users posted about slash fanfiction, a category of homoerotic fan works. These users did so while also providing measures of identification such as their full name, links to other social media platforms that contain more personal information, and demographic information such as their age, sexuality, and ethnicity. All of these videos also featured the user’s face. These measures of identification are made possible through TikTok’s personalization features, and can potentially make a user publicly identifiable. This seems to demonstrate a shift in the self presentation of fanfiction participants and the level of confidence that slash participants have in their engagement with the community, as well as indicate an anonymity collapse. However, while many users discuss fanfiction in association with their real-life identities online, a large number of users also express explicit embarrassment or shame in regard to those practices, and are unlikely to admit to writing fanfiction. These results indicate a possible shift in the ways that fans perceive the stigma around fanfiction, which parallels the general lessening of stigma around homosexuality and female sexual expression.