Rianna Walcott

As digital platforms continually evolve, rapid changes to platform affordances quickly render digital tools and data collection methods obsolete. Researchers of digital culture therefore must proactively adapt to the ephemerality of data. This paper examines these challenges within the context of Twitter (X) following its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk, and the subsequent limiting of access to the API for data collection. Using a combination of manual data-collection practices and Zeeschuimer [Peeters 2025], a browser extension that collects social media data while browsing, researchers developed a novel data collection method, and model methodological adaptability within shifting digital terrains.

Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

Technoskepticism explores possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies, covering a wide range of pressing topics from Munchausen syndrome by TikTok to wellness apps to online communities to AI. This book was co-written by an intergenerational group of 14 scholars in the DISCO Network, a consortium of investigators working to envision a new anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future. Technoskepticism features scholarship by COMM Associate Professor and Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab Director Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, and COMM Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BCaT Lab Dr. Rianna Walcott.