Malicious earworms and useful memes, how the far-right surfs on TikTok audio trends

With its features of remix, TikTok is the designated platform for meme-making and dissemination. Creative combinations of video, emoji, and filters allow for an endless stream of memes and trends animated by sound. The platform has focused its moderation on upholding physical safety, hence investing in the detection of harmful challenges. In response to the DSA, TikTok implemented opt-outs for personalized feeds and features allowing users to report illegal content. At the same time, the platform remains subject to scrutiny. Centering on the role of sound and its intersections with ambiguous memes, the presented research probed right-wing extremist formations relating to the 2024 German state elections. The analysis evidences how the TikTok sound infrastructure affords a sustained presence of xenophobic content, often cloaked through vernacular modes of communication. These cloaking practices benefit from a sound infrastructure that affords the ongoing posting of user-generated sounds that instantly spread through the use-this-sound button. Importantly, these sounds are often not clearly recognizable as networkers of extremist content. Songs that do contain hateful lyrics are not eligible for personalized feeds, however, they remain online where they profit from intersecting with benign meme trends, rendering them visible in search results.