When The Algorithm Spoke My Language

For most of my childhood, communication felt like a wall I could see clearly but never quite climb. At five years old, I was diagnosed with autism and began the slow, deliberate process of learning social rules that everyone else seemed to absorb without effort. Tone, timing and implication were not instinctive. Language was never just something people used; it was a system that decided who belonged and who stood quietly on the outside. That early experience left me hyperaware of how communication structures can include some voices while invisibly excluding others.

Long before TikTok, I understood what it meant to be out of sync with the dominant conversation. In middle school, cultural trends spread through television shows and streaming platforms that my family didn’t have access to. Entire friendships were formed around references I couldn’t place and stories I had never seen. Culture had gatekeepers, and connection depended on access, proximity, and social fluency.

TikTok dismantled that system.

Unlike earlier media platforms, TikTok does not organize culture around institutions or social networks. It organizes it around emotion. The platform’s algorithm observes every move users make, what they linger on, replay, or react to, and it uses those signals to connect people through shared affect rather than shared status. Media scholar Zizi Papacharissi describes this phenomenon as the rise of affective publics: networked communities formed through emotional expression rather than formal organization. TikTok is one of the most powerful infrastructures for affective publics we have ever seen, and I experience this every time I open the app.

When I began posting content on TikTok about navigating aliyah, missing America, and adjusting to a new language and culture, I expected my content to just be appreciated for editing skills or entertainment. Instead, it found exactly the people who would be impacted emotionally by it. My videos landed on the For You Pages of students considering moving to Israel, Americans studying Hebrew, and others struggling with the same sense of dislocation I felt. Strangers began suggesting places to visit, asking for college advice, or sharing their own stories of moving across the world. We were not connected by geography or social circles. We were connected by shared emotional experience, detected and amplified by an algorithm that brought us what we’re looking for.

Research on digital virality helps explain why this works. Berger and Milkman’s study on online content exhibits how content that evokes recognition, belonging, or intensity is far more likely to spread than neutral information. TikTok operationalizes this insight at scale. It learns emotional patterns and uses them to curate shared attention, creating what feels like instant intimacy between strangers.

This emotional matching also explains how niche media rapidly becomes mainstream. I watched this happen through TikTok edits of books that turned into shows like Heated Rivalry. What began as a relatively obscure fandom gained traction as TikTok edits of the show circulated. Viewers who got videos about the show on their algorithm were interested, streamed it, then created their own content about it, and fed the algorithm further data. Scholars studying short-form platforms describe this as a feedback loop: emotional engagement drives visibility, which drives cultural relevance. TikTok doesn’t just reflect popularity, but produces and pushes it using emotion.

For someone like me, this system is transformative. As an autistic person, I have always approached communication analytically, learning patterns others absorbed intuitively. TikTok’s algorithm operates in a surprisingly similar way. It does not rely on social guesswork; it reads signals. It recognizes emotion before identity. In doing so, it created a space where I could finally be understood without having to translate myself constantly.

This system can also be explained within what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. A structure that monetizes emotional data and predicts behavior, giving viewers videos they might not even realize they enjoy. Algorithms shape what we see, feel, and believe. Make no mistake, reducing TikTok to exploitation alone misses its social impact. The same systems that extract data also create new forms of connection, particularly for people historically pushed to the margins of traditional communication structures.

TikTok did not just give me a platform. It gave me a public that spoke my language.

We are living through a shift in how community forms. Culture no longer spreads only through institutions, nor does belonging require physical proximity. It is increasingly organized through emotional cognition, mediated by algorithms that sort, amplify, and connect feeling. The question is not whether this power exists – it does. The question is whether we understand it well enough to use it responsibly, demand transparency, and protect the emotional lives it shapes.

For years, communication felt like a wall. TikTok didn’t remove that wall—but it showed me a new way through it.

Berger, Jonah, and Katherine L. Milkman. “What Makes Online Content Viral?” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012): 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0353.

Jiang, Qian, and Liangying Ma. “Swiping More, Thinking Less: Using TikTok Hinders Analytic Thinking.” Cyberpsychology 18, no. 3 (2024).     https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/rep/article/1666895.

Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Yousef, Ahmed Mohamed Fahmy, et al. “Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review.” Brain Sciences 15, no. 3 (2025). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11939997/.

Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89.