Social media is facing major changes both here and abroad. In Australia, apart from the revised misinformation bill, the Albanese Government has said legislation will be introduced this year to impose an age restriction for Australians using social media platforms. So it’s interesting to note that the International Paralympic Committees (IPC) partnered with TikTok for the recent Paris 2024 Paralympics. And one clear aim of TikTok Australia’s partnership with Paralympics Australia was to change community perceptions, with Generation Z and millennials as the main target audiences.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. On the one hand, TikTok presents a potential security and privacy risk for the Australian Government, as revealed by the app’s ban on government devices in April 2023. On the other hand, it also has the potential to increase diversity and representation in the media by reaching large audiences of young people.
In their article 'The (In)validity of Supercrip Representation of Paralympian athletes', authors Carla Filomena Silva and P. David Howe argue that media patterns of disability representation have been ‘manufactured alongside an emotional “ethos” that reproduces the dominant binary abled/disabled’. They argue that conventional Paralympic stories tend to highlight individuals who have overcome adversity, thereby depicting people with impairments as ‘“super” in contexts where an able-bodied individual would be just an ordinary person’. Consequently, a person’s identity is framed as their disability rather than their skill in sports.
By contrast, the content that featured on the @ausparalympics TikTok page challenged these stereotypes and did not play into a dominant binary. Rather, the content informed audiences, particularly in video explainers of sports such as ‘para-table tennis’ and interviews with para-athletes such as Ameera Lee. These appeared alongside highlights such as Michael Roeger’s silver medal win.
Of course, we should be concerned about the way social media platforms can spread false information and about the vulnerability of young users, just as we should be concerned about bad journalism practice that does not incorporate fairness, balance and ethical editorial judgement. But in the partnership between TikTok and the Paralympics, diversity and good story-telling were fostered. It was more than a mere PR stunt.
Alana Su-Navratil, CMT Research Assistant