Tech Giants and the Appropriation Economy: How TikTok, Twitter, and Meta Exploit Culture for Growth
In the relentless quest for engagement, tech titans like TikTok, Twitter, and Meta have weaponized a troubling strategy: cultural appropriation. This isn’t just academic jargon; it’s a stark reality impacting the creators and communities that drive digital innovation. After years inside companies driven by the “growth at all costs” mantra, I’ve seen these dynamics up close and personal.
The Alchemy of Culture into Capital
Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” For many tech platforms, cultural appropriation has become the main course. Culture — the connective tissue of our identities and the pulse behind viral trends — is being mined by digital giants, often at the expense of its originators. Let’s unravel how these platforms turn cultural gold into corporate profit and the high-tech tools enabling this transformation.
Appropriation: The Growth Hack Big Tech Can’t Quit
Cultural appropriation — the extraction of elements from marginalized cultures without context, consent, or compensation — has become Silicon Valley’s favorite growth hack. This digital colonialism is on overdrive, powered by algorithms that amplify without discerning origin.
Take TikTok, for instance, where Black creators routinely see their innovations co-opted. Remember the “Renegade” dance? It was Jalaiah Harmon’s brainchild, but it only exploded into ubiquity after non-Black influencers popularized it without credit, leaving Harmon an anonymous architect of her own viral phenomenon. This isn’t a glitch; it’s TikTok’s business model in action.
Twitter and Meta are equally complicit. Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have driven unprecedented engagement on Twitter, yet the platform’s support for these communities remains performative at best. These digital town squares often become arenas for targeted harassment, while the same platforms profit from activist hashtags.
By the Numbers: Engagement Rich, Recognition Poor
The data paints a grim picture of disparity. TikTok hit 1 billion users by 2020, coinciding with surges around major cultural moments. A 2021 study revealed that while content from Black creators often garners higher engagement, this rarely translates into equitable monetization opportunities.
Twitter’s data confirms that Black users and Black cultural discourse generate outsized engagement. Yet, Black Twitter frequently reports a gauntlet of harassment and platform indifference. On Meta’s Instagram, initiatives like #BlackoutTuesday, intended as digital solidarity, instead drowned out critical activist voices — a cruel irony of algorithmic amplification.
The Algorithm is the Appropriator
Behind every viral dance, every trending hashtag, lurks an invisible hand: AI-driven algorithms that decide visibility, virality, and value. These systems, however, are far from neutral arbiters.
TikTok’s machine learning algorithms, the secret sauce of its addictive For You Page (FYP), analyze engagement patterns to boost trending content. But this code carries biases, often sidelining content from marginalized creators while pushing similar material from more “marketable” faces. The platform has faced accusations of actively suppressing Black creators’ videos, embodying algorithmic discrimination.
Twitter’s AI, which curates content recommendations and anoints trending topics, similarly lacks cultural context. It amplifies engagement indiscriminately, meaning appropriated trends can overshadow originators. When a hashtag goes viral, Twitter’s systems don’t distinguish between attribution and appropriation.
Meta’s News Feed and Instagram’s Explore page, also AI-powered, prioritize “engaging” content — a metric that favors controversy and imitation over originality. The result? A feedback loop where viral posts, including those built on appropriated culture, dominate. Instagram’s failure to ensure creator credits, especially for marginalized voices, is a feature, not a bug.
Real-world Repercussions of Virtual Bias
In 2021, leaked internal documents from Meta revealed a troubling truth: despite Black and Latinx users driving significant platform activity, their content faces disproportionate scrutiny and removal. This disparity lays bare that cultural engagement does not equate to equitable treatment.
The Human Cost of Algorithmic Theft
“I created the dance, and I never got any credit,” says Jalaiah Harmon, reflecting on the Renegade phenomenon. Her experience epitomizes a broader pattern where Black creativity fuels platforms, but Black creators are left empty-handed. As Taylor Lorenz reported in the New York Times, “TikTok has turned dance creators into stars, but the Black creators who often create the dances rarely reap the benefits.”
When trends like #BlackLivesMatter galvanize Twitter, Black activists often bear a double burden: driving engagement while weathering storms of racist backlash. Activist Jesse Williams notes, “Our trauma shouldn’t be fodder for retweets when the platform won’t protect us from abuse.”
On Instagram, the gap between influence and income is stark. Ziggi Tyler, a Black TikTok creator, demonstrated how the platform’s creator marketplace blocked terms like “Black success,” while allowing “white success” — a literal devaluation of Blackness. “The algorithm doesn’t just reflect biases,” Tyler argues. “It amplifies them, pricing us out of our own cultural contributions.”
These aren’t just anecdotes; they’re data points in a systemic problem. A 2021 study by MIT Technology Review found that Instagram’s algorithm was 1.5 times more likely to flag tweets from Black users as “offensive.” Meanwhile, an MSL Group report revealed that Black influencers earn 35% less than white peers for the same work.
Coding Bias: The Diversity Deficit in AI
Dr. Safiya Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” puts it bluntly: “When AI systems are developed by homogenous teams, they encode the biases and blind spots of their creators. Cultural appropriation becomes invisibly baked into the product.”
For example, Meta reported that only 6.3% of its technical workforce identified as Black or Latinx. At Twitter, the figure stood at 6.1%. TikTok’s workforce demographics remain opaque.
Global Perspectives on Digital Colonialism
While U.S.-centric narratives often dominate tech discourse, cultural appropriation on social platforms is a global phenomenon. In Brazil, Twitter trends often originate in favela communities before being co-opted by mainstream influencers. South African TikTok creator Witney8 laments, “Our dances go viral, but we don’t. It’s like our culture is for everyone except us.”
This digital colonialism echoes historical patterns. Just as blues and jazz were once appropriated from Black musicians, today’s online trends are extracted from marginalized communities worldwide — repackaged for mass consumption without credit or context.
The Way Forward: Ethical Algorithms and Creator Economics
Tackling tech’s appropriation problem demands a multi-pronged approach:
- Algorithmic Accountability: Platforms must audit their AI for bias and build systems that detect and credit original creators. As Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League advocates, “We need inclusive AI that sees and serves everyone.”
- Diversity in Development: Tech companies should set aggressive targets for diversifying their AI teams. Different perspectives in the room can preempt biased outcomes.
- Economic Empowerment: Fair compensation is overdue. Platforms should develop specific monetization pathways for originators of viral trends, ensuring the value they create cycles back.
- Legal and Ethical Frameworks: It’s time to explore how intellectual property law can evolve to protect cultural products in the digital age. Ethicists and policymakers must also grapple with platforms’ moral obligations to the communities they profit from.
- User Agency: As consumers of content, we all play a role. Supporting original creators, amplifying their work, and demanding attribution can shift incentives.
The stakes transcend any single dance craze or hashtag. When Big Tech appropriates culture for growth, it doesn’t just exploit — it entrenches long-standing inequities. In an ideal world, virality would enrich the ingenious communities behind it. Instead, we’re seeing an extractive economy that treats culture as raw material and creators as anonymous labor.
Let’s make it clear: we need to shift from an appropriation economy to a genuine creator economy. The road ahead is long, but with concerted effort and accountability, we can get there. It’s time for Big Tech to recognize and reward the very cultures that drive its growth.
And Since You Have Read This Far…
While everything above is true and has source material to back it up, AI wrote this. I have been experimenting with training a GPT and am interested in knowing if this captures my voice, tone and tenor. Let me know what you think in the comments.
