The Journal of Community Informatics released a new edition that has a number of broadband-forward or adjacent articles. (I mentioned this edition before.) There is an interesting article on Addressing Homelessness Through Equitable Design on TikTok. Here’s the abstract…
This study examines the digital experiences of individuals experiencing homelessness on TikTok, focusing on their usage patterns, challenges, and opportunities for social connection. Through a review of literature and analysis of TikTok content, the study examines how individuals experiencing homelessness use social media, the challenges they encounter, and the potential benefits and risks associated with online engagement. Despite challenges such as network access, device quality, and privacy concerns, homeless individuals navigate digital spaces to share personal stories, seek support, and participate in online communities. The study identifies themes related to digital divide perceptions, survival infrastructuring, social capital building, and health information seeking behaviours among homeless populations on TikTok. Based on these insights, the study proposes platform-level and user-level recommendations to improve the digital experiences of homeless individuals on TikTok, focusing on bandwidth-sensitive design, enhanced privacy controls, and security toolkits. These recommendations aim to promote digital inclusion and support for vulnerable populations in the digital age, contributing to ongoing discussions about equity and social support online.
By question was – why TikTok, but they answered that up front…
While previous research has examined how marginalized communities use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, TikTok presents a unique case due to its algorithm-driven content distribution, highly visual nature, and participatory culture. Unlike text-heavy platforms, TikTok’s short-form video format enables individuals to share personal narratives in compelling ways. Its algorithm-driven distribution enables content from marginalized users to achieve visibility far beyond their networks; its video-based format allows creators to share personal narratives even with limited literacy; and its participatory culture supports resource-sharing and solidarity. For unhoused individuals, these affordances may create new opportunities to document lived experiences, seek aid, and contest stigma. At the same time, the same mechanisms also pose heightened risks of exposure and coercion. This duality is especially pressing in Canada, where the Privacy Commissioner’s 2025report noted that despite TikTok being most used social media app by children and teens, it fails to adequately explain its data practices for these vulnerable groups(Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2025). For unhoused individuals, who already face heightened risks of surveillance and coercion, such opacity compounds existing vulnerabilities. With over 14 million users on TikTok and a steadily growing daily user base(Statista, 2022), it becomes pertinent to understand the nature of interaction and user behaviour on the platform—especially when members of vulnerable groups have a different experience on the same. By situating homelessness within the broader literature on digital inequality and community informatics, this study asks how design and policy might better support unhoused individuals engaging with TikTok. Specifically, given the prevalence of smartphone access and social media use as well as the heterogeneous, complex nature of homelessness, this study looks at the existing literature in the domain to answer the following questions:
1. How do individuals experiencing homelessness use social media platforms like TikTok?
2. What are the primary challenges they face in doing so?