From content flows to legitimacy competition
TikTok governance under competitive digital sovereignty
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22092580 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Qiwei Huang (0000-0001-9021-6320, Hunan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-29 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Frontiers in Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2297-900X • E-ISSN: 2297-900X |
| Publisher | Frontiers Media SA (PUBLISHER • CH) |
| DOI | 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1868870 |
| OpenAlex | W7162764018 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
Regulatory controversies surrounding TikTok have made visible a shift in international communication: cross-border communication is increasingly conditioned not only by content flows, national image, or strategic narratives, but by whether the platform infrastructures that organize visibility can acquire legitimacy across heterogeneous jurisdictional public arenas. This Conceptual Analysis develops a communication-centered framework for this shift. It differentiates three concepts that are often blurred in discussions of platform geopolitics. Competitive digital sovereignty refers to the jurisdictional, discursive, and infrastructural struggle through which public authorities and other empowered actors define the risks, responsibilities, and rule-making authority attached to the same cross-border platform. Platform legitimacy refers to sociological recognition, not normative approval: the extent to which a platform is treated as institutionally acceptable within a jurisdictional public arena. Legitimacy translation refers to the platform's organizational and communicative effort to convert external demands into locally intelligible arrangements, including data localization, auditing, corporate restructuring, safety commitments, and claims of public value. The article situates this framework in relation to digital constitutionalism, the Brussels Effect, splinternet debates, regulatory capitalism, and platform geopolitics. TikTok is treated as a generative rather than representative case because its visibility, scale, Chinese ownership, and regulatory salience expose mechanisms that are especially relevant for geopolitically contested platforms. The article derives heuristic expectations for U.S., EU, China-related, and platform self-presentational discourses, and proposes a cautious pathway for future empirical examination. Its contribution is to reposition international communication as a field concerned with the legitimacy of communicative infrastructures as well as the circulation of content
Corporate governance · Digital content · European union · Global governance · Legitimacy · Normative · Sovereignty · Transnational governance · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Digital Media and Philosophy · Security, Politics, and Digital Transformation
Between Truth and Power
The Brussels Effect
The Platform Society
The platform governance triangle
Managing Legitimacy
Corporate policies to protect against disinformation for young audiences
Digital sovereignty
Making Systemic Risk Assessments Work
Geopolitics in Platform Governance
The Post-Public Sphere and Neo-Regulation of Digital Platforms
Data sovereignty and platform neutrality – A comparative study on TikTok’s data policy
Exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems
Beyond the Ban
Media Governance
What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital
The platformization of cultural production
Critically understanding the platformization of the public sphere
Framing
How platforms govern
Rethinking the Public Sphere
The Platformization of the Web
| Highly cited | No |
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