Algospeak as Register-Potential: Multimodal Communication Manipulation in Response to Algorithmic Content Moderation on TikTok

In this article, I report the results of a data collection study on TikTok algospeak (e.g. seggs for ‘sex’), multimodal communication manipulation users deploy to evade algorithmic scrutiny and navigate platform visibility. Users’ algospeak communications were observed to qualify the manipulation mechanisms at work, with specific attention paid to multimodality – how users strategically exploit the platform’s architecture, technical capabilities, and interactive conventions across the written/textual, spoken/audio, and visual/video communicative modalities. Based on these data, I propose a preliminary taxonomy of algospeak strategies for communication manipulation. I conceptualize these algospeak strategies as comprising a kind of emergent register of computer-mediated communication (CMC), or register-potential, deployed in response to shifting platform-specific capabilities, constraints, and users’ perceptions of content moderation threats. In my contribution to growing algospeak literature, I foreground CMC registers as a conceptual apparatus by which multimodal algospeak can be understood. I highlight algospeak’s multimodality to situate it within CMC register discourses, considering TikTok’s technological architecture and how it enables a fluidly multimodal register like algospeak to emerge.