From Signs to Stigma: Enregisterment and Platformed Racism in TikTok Comments
Keywords:
enregisterment; language ideologies; platformed racism; moral boundary making; digital vigilantism; TikTok; critical sociolinguistics; ELT media literacyAbstract
This article investigates how stigma around so-called “gang hand signs” is produced, circulated, and negotiated in TikTok comment threads. Drawing on a case-bounded corpus of 675 comments posted under five videos from the account TopNotch Idiots (posted in 2023; comments captured in 2025), the analysis integrates critical sociolinguistics and language-ideological perspectives with the concepts of enregisterment and platformed racism. We operationalize a two-layer coding scheme: stigma processes (labeling, stereotyping, separation/status loss, discrimination) and sociolinguistic lenses (indexicals of risk, digital gatekeeping, platformed racism cues, moral-panic rhetoric). Findings show that gestures are enregistered as a default “danger register,” normalizing punitive discourse (“deserve to get hurt”); commenters perform outsider exclusion and moral boundary-making; and racialized/locational cues align with platformed racism, intensified by platform affordances and virality. We discuss implications for critical media literacy and English language pedagogy in Indonesia, arguing that user-generated discourse not only mainstream media now participates in the production of stigma and public moralities. The study contributes to research on indexicality, platform governance, and digital vigilantism, and suggests ethics-oriented classroom practices for interrogating harmful registers online
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