TikTok creators in Czechia and Ukraine are filming their everyday lives during wartime, and this project follows them to understand how they build authority online. The research addresses a gap in knowledge about social media communication in Central and Eastern Europe, a region largely overlooked in studies of influencer culture. It also tackles a broader problem: as trust in traditional expert authorities declines across Europe, people increasingly turn to user-generated content for information during crises. By combining digital anthropology with communication studies, the project will map the cultural patterns and norms behind content creation, focusing on how authenticity—rooted in the "being there" experience—grants creators credibility. If successful, the research could reveal how local voices gain traction on a global platform during geopolitical upheaval, offering insights into the shifting dynamics of expertise and trust in online spaces. This is fundamental social science: it will not produce a tool or policy overnight, but understanding how authority is constructed on platforms like TikTok could inform future approaches to crisis communication, media literacy, and public trust.
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The project focuses on content creators on the social media platform TikTok and their involvement in the communication about the armed conflict in Ukraine. Empirically, the project is grounded in offline and online ethnographic fieldwork with Czech and Ukrainian content creators and looks at everyday practices, norms, and cultural patterns around the process of content creation. On a theoretical level, the project proposes to build a conceptual framework for studying the construction of authority on a user-generated content platform, where the notion of authenticity, based on the "being there" experience, plays an important role. Its overall aim is to map how content creators are building authority and expertise within online communication against the background of geopolitical crisis and a general decline of trust in expert authorities across Europe. The project will fill a significant gap in knowledge by focusing on the region of Central and Eastern Europe, so far understudied in the field of social media communication and influencer cultures, and bring important, situated knowledge about how local voices are being heard on a global platform during a crisis. The project is designed as interdisciplinary, combining the methods of digital anthropology with the approach of communication studies. The project will be conducted at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Miller. The project also includes a short secondment at Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University, Australia, which will help to contextualize the research in global influencer culture studies.
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