Sonic Contagion and the Typologies of Hate on TikTok

Introduction

On February 28, 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House in a highly publicized and ultimately contentious diplomatic meeting with President Donald Trump.¹ The visit, meant to secure continued American support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, ended abruptly following a tense exchange in the Oval Office. One of the most visibly—and vocally executed—demeaning moments came when far-right media personality Brian Glenn turned to Zelensky and asked, “Do you even own a suit? Why aren’t you wearing a suit?”² Though brief, the comment captured the spirit of the meeting: a wartime leader was treated not as a peer, but as an interloper, unworthy of seriousness, decorum, and, most of all, respect.

This posture of contempt rapidly migrated to online platforms. Soon after, TikTok users began disseminating AI-generated videos that mocked Zelensky’s physical appearance and demeanor. One widely circulated example featured a digitally miniaturized Zelensky being tossed into the air like a child by Trump, accompanied by Johann Strauss I’s 1848 “Radetzky March” (image 1).³

Image 1.

AI-generated TikTok of Zelensky at the Oval Office.⁴

At one point, Vice President Vance is seen tugging on Zelensky’s leg as if to keep him from escaping, while Trump repeatedly strikes him with a shoe. The video includes a caption—“Oh Nah!!! 😅 AI is getting out of control!”—but this text offers no interpretive anchor. Instead, the tone is flippant, deflecting from the deeper implications of the imagery and sound. There is no dialogue, no overt symbols, and no explicit hostility. Yet it is precisely this absence that makes the clip analytically significant.

Rather than signaling harm through explicit declaration, the video operates through affective and historically legible cues. A digitally miniaturized Jewish leader is infantilized and physically mocked, set against the light, whimsical strains of the march. Together, sound and image render the scene playful, ironic, and laced with derision, encouraging the viewer to read humiliation as humor. As historian Timothy Snyder notes, the encounter itself recalled early twentieth-century images of “the Jewish politician as groveling petitioner,” a visual tradition that cast Jewish political actors as weak, manipulative, and undeserving of respect.⁵ This figure is not politically neutral; it belongs to a longer history of antisemitic representation that frames Jewish authority as illegitimate and inherently suspect.

What is striking, then, is that antisemitism appears here not as explicit declaration, but aesthetic construction. It emerges through juxtaposition, through the interplay of sound and image. The dance between Trump and Zelensky becomes cruelly ironic, its levity functioning as a mechanism of humiliation. In this context, Strauss’s march becomes an instrument of what I understand as “sonic hate”—not because the music itself is hateful, but because its pairing with manipulated visuals encodes derision, diminishment, and historically recognizable antisemitic tropes.

While this example demonstrates how sonic hate can operate through subtle, aestheticized mechanisms, it does not always do so. In other cases, hate is explicit, direct, and unmistakable. Take Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) track “Heil Hitler,” released on May 8, 2025.⁶ While Spotify and SoundCloud removed the song within hours, its 25-second chorus—“N*****, Heil Hitler . . .”—circulated rapidly on TikTok and other platforms, divorced from the full track and repurposed into audio memes, clipped uploads, and ironic remixes. This rapid spread was facilitated by the track’s loopable structure, optimized for TikTok’s remix culture—a process I understand as “sonic contagion,” whereby sound circulates algorithmically through repetition, reuse, and affective uptake.

The chorus (figure 1) is constructed for repetition: a tight rhythmic loop combining martial percussion, distorted brass, and provocative vocal phrases. Its catchiness and aggression make it ideal for remixing and reuse. In this context, the track functions as what I term “sonic wallpaper”—audio that, once detached from its original context, can be endlessly repeated, recontextualized, and disseminated without requiring narrative coherence.

Figure 1.

Ye’s “Heil Hitler” (2025) chorus structure.

For instance, in one widely circulated TikTok, a user “stitched” a video of Orthodox Jewish men dancing at a wedding (image 2), replacing the original music with this audio.

Image 2.

Orthodox Jewish men dancing with stitched “Heil Hitler” audio.

The juxtaposition produces a dissonant audiovisual encounter in which antisemitic language is layered onto Jewish celebration. Here, repetition does not dilute meaning but intensifies it. The loop becomes both anchor and vehicle, enabling the sound to circulate widely while acquiring new affective and ideological resonances through recombination.

In this article, I examine how sound—not just speech, music, or lyrics, but loops, vibes, and ambient tracks—functions as a vehicle for hate on TikTok. It argues that sonic elements play a central role in encoding, circulating, and aestheticizing hostility in its various forms. While scholarship and content moderation efforts have focused primarily on text and visuals, sound remains an underexamined yet crucial axis of online harm. This study addresses that gap by demonstrating how audio is not simply accessory to visual content but a driving force in how hate becomes viral, affective, and culturally resonant.

I develop this argument in two parts. First, I introduce a theoretical framework for understanding how sound operates on TikTok, defining the three interrelated concepts introduced above: sonic wallpaper (TikTok’s looping audio that undergirds video content), sonic hate (the use of sound to encode, amplify, or express hate), and sonic contagion (the algorithmic spread of content—in this case harmful content—through aesthetic and affective repetition). Together, these terms provide a vocabulary for analyzing how TikTok’s audio layer functions as a key site for the transmission of affect and ideology.

Second, I apply this framework through a four-part typology of sonic hate, drawing on case studies from my fieldwork:

1. Direct lyrical reference

2. Emotive suggestion

3. Contextual juxtaposition

4. Sonic dog whistles

The case studies I’ve compiled as representative of these typologies draw comparisons across multiple geopolitical and cultural contexts. These comparisons are not intended to suggest moral equivalence between different forms of hate or their historical weight. Rather, they identify structural parallels in how sound operates as a medium for encoding, circulating, and normalizing hostility within platform environments.

While much scholarship on TikTok has focused on visual culture, algorithmic logic, or identity performance, its sonic dimensions remain significantly understudied. That said, important work is emerging. This article builds on recent contributions by Paula Harper, Kate Galloway, Braxton Shelley, and Lindsay Wright, who have each explored how digital platforms mediate sound, musicality, and listening practices. Although their work addresses TikTok only tangentially, it provides crucial frameworks for thinking about how sound circulates online: Harper analyzes autoplay and audile attention in platform capitalism; Galloway examines choreomusicality and meme culture; Shelley theorizes sonic endurance through broadcast Pentecostalism; and Wright critiques the exclusionary logics of musical formatting.⁸ Still, a TikTok-specific theoretical model for how sound functions—and how it mutates into a medium of ideological harm—remains underdeveloped. This article contributes to that growing conversation by offering such a framework.

When hate circulates through vibe—that is, as an ambient mood or affective texture encoded in sonic form rather than explicit rhetoric—listening must be treated not only as a method of critical inquiry but as a form of critical listening. In sound studies, critical listening does not refer simply to attentive hearing, but to an analytic and ethical practice that interrogates how sound is structured, mediated, and made meaningful within relations of power. Scholars such as Jennifer Stoever, Jonathan Sterne, and Nina Sun Eidsheim have shown, in different ways, that listening is never neutral: it is shaped by racialized norms, technological conditions, and embodied frameworks of interpretation.⁹ Pauline Oliveros and Ralina Joseph further emphasize that listening is also a cultivated and ethical practice—one that must be trained, and one that demands accountability to power, difference, and how speakers wish to be heard.¹⁰

I also build on a broader scholarly inquiry developed through the Sounding Out! Series “Hate and Non-Human Listening,” which brings together interdisciplinary work on how listening is being reconfigured across domains such as artificial intelligence, surveillance, and platformed media. Here, I focus specifically on how forms of non-human listening operate within platformed environments.¹¹ Critical listening must also account for how listening is reorganized as an infrastructural process.

In the algorithmically curated spaces of platforms like TikTok, where virality privileges feeling over meaning, the auditory dimension becomes central to how violence is aestheticized, shared, and normalized. As Steve Goodman emphasizes in Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, sound operates below the threshold of representation, targeting the body and the nervous system; it is precisely this subliminal power that makes listening indispensable to the project of confronting digital hate.¹² Goodman is concerned with the production of “bad vibes,” “those immersive sonic environments of dread, discomfort, and fear designed to destabilize or control”; TikTok, by contrast, thrives on the circulation of “good vibes,” i.e., affectively pleasing, often nostalgic or playful sonic atmospheres that cloak harmful content in the aesthetics of joy, irony, or trendiness. The violence does not shock; it seduces. In this inversion, the danger lies not in sonic disturbance, but in sonic pleasure. Listening thus becomes an ethical obligation, not to decode overt hate, but to attune to how harm hides within affective ease, how “good vibes” can be the cover under which violence quietly spreads.

Methodology: Digital Ethnography, Sonic Analysis, and Platform Ethics

This study draws on digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020–25 across TikTok and adjacent platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook. While TikTok serves as the primary field site, I also trace the afterlives of sonic content as it circulates beyond the platform. By “afterlives,” I refer to how sounds, trends, and audiovisual formats migrate across platforms and are recontextualized within new discursive environments. These cross-platform circulations demonstrate that sonic content is not confined to a single platform’s logic but continues to accrue meaning as it is embedded in different technological, cultural, and ideological contexts.

My engagement with TikTok as a research site emerged through earlier work on the aestheticization of Holocaust memory in digital culture. Initially approached as an example of mediated postmemory, this encounter prompted a broader investigation into how sound, affect, and platform design shape the circulation of historical trauma and contemporary hate. This focus expanded through subsequent research and teaching, where student-led examples revealed the extent to which multimodal design—especially sound—structures interpretation, often operating as an affective layer that reframes content independent of explicit textual meaning.

Building on this foundation, I developed a methodology capable of accounting for the speed, scale, and affective intensity of platformed content. Drawing on Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), this approach treats social media platforms not as neutral containers but as active mediators that shape discourse through algorithmic recommendation systems, interface design, and participatory affordances.¹³ Within this framework, listening becomes a methodological orientation: the focus is not only on what users say or post, but on how sound is encountered, reused, and circulated—and how it structures social interaction.

To observe these dynamics, I constructed a controlled research environment across platforms. To minimize algorithmic conditioning, I conducted this research using newly created accounts, accessed through a separate device, allowing me to observe how platforms generate and prioritize content in the absence of established user signals. Rather than engaging with content through liking, sharing, or commenting, I adopted a non-interventionist approach, allowing feeds to develop through algorithmic recommendation rather than explicit user input. This made it possible to analyze how content surfaced, circulated, and was patterned across different ideological and affective registers.

Case studies were identified through iterative observation, including engagement with recommended content, sound-based browsing, and hashtag tracking (both sonic and textual). As materials emerged, I engaged in systematic archiving and analysis, documenting not only textual and visual elements but also sonic and affective dimensions. This included attention to platform affordances such as remixing and audio reuse, as well as patterns of repetition, mutation, and cross-platform migration. Given the opacity of platform algorithms, the personalization of content feeds, and the ephemerality of viral media, the typology offered here should be understood as an interpretive framework grounded in situated observation rather than a comprehensive taxonomy.

Finally, this methodology is shaped by the ethical demands of studying violence, hate, and trauma in real time. Researching platformed content requires attention not only to analytical rigor but also to the conditions under which such material is encountered, processed, and sustained. This approach aligns with the ethical frameworks outlined by the Association of Internet Researchers, which emphasize context-sensitive, processual decision-making when working with publicly accessible yet ethically complex digital materials.¹⁴ The methodology developed here is therefore both analytical and ethical, designed to account for the infrastructural, affective, and human dimensions of studying hate in digital environments.

Theoretical Framework

Every TikTok video is composed of three primary layers (figure 2): text (captions, hashtags, comments), image (still or moving visuals), and what I term “sonic wallpaper”—the underlying audio (recurring clips, loops, fragments), whether musical, spoken, or ambient, that functions simultaneously as aesthetic background and cultural signal. In line with sound studies approaches that treat sound as material and infrastructural rather than merely representational, sonic wallpaper operates not as background but as an organizing force that structures attention, affect, and interpretation. In this sense, it operates as a form of sonic metadata, embedding affective cues and interpretive frames into each post’s atmosphere.

Figure 2:

TikTok’s three primary layers.

Sonic wallpaper functions simultaneously as a hashtag and a meme: like a hashtag, it links disparate content through a shared, searchable sound; like a meme, it evolves through iterative reuse, accruing new meanings and associations across contexts. While visual memes have long been understood as units of cultural transmission, TikTok’s audio layer extends this logic into the sonic domain, where repetition, remixing, and affective resonance drive circulation.

Writing in The New York Times, Charlotte Shane describes TikTok’s sonic environment as a form of “brainfeel,” noting that users are “so inherently affected by sounds on TikTok that aren’t inherently musical, nor have a lot of verbal information.”¹⁵ While I concur with her emphasis on the visceral immediacy of these soundscapes—and the relative absence of overtly “literary” content—I challenge the claim that such sounds are not inherently musical. Sonic wallpapers are, in fact, musical forms: modular, affectively charged units that evolve through reuse while retaining traces of their prior iterations. Each repetition carries forward a network of references, resonances, and ideological associations.

Consider the 2022 “It’s Corn” phenomenon, in which a young boy went viral due to the distinctive timbre of his voice and his enthusiastic declaration of his love for corn (image 3). The clip’s sonic element—“I mean, just look at this thing! It’s corn!”—quickly became the basis for widespread remixing.

Image 3.

Original “It’s Corn” TikTok.

This example encapsulates TikTok’s three primary layers. Following its circulation, the audio was extracted and remixed—set to music with rhythmic and melodic enhancements—producing a second-order sonic wallpaper. Both the original and remixed versions proliferated across the platform, serving as background audio for hundreds of thousands of derivative videos (image 4). This process illustrates how sound becomes modular and generative, transforming a moment of childlike sincerity into a cultural artifact that exceeds its original context.

Image 4.

“It’s Corn” sonic wallpaper and its remixes.

Regardless of how textual or visual elements shift across iterations, the sonic wallpaper often remains consistent, pointing back to its source. Sound thus becomes the most stable referent, anchoring meaning, memory, and recognition even as other layers change.

In their work on the visual meme, Hendrik-Zoltán Andermann and Boris Zizek argue that “the dissemination of visual data . . . is related to the fact that images are easily remembered by the consumer and generally generate a strong emotional effect . . . because significantly more information can be obtained with an image than with a text message: A picture is worth a thousand words.”¹⁶ This claim reflects a broader tendency in media discourse to privilege visuality as the primary carrier of meaning, relegating sound to the status of affective supplement or background. Even when sonic elements are clearly operative, they are often treated as secondary rather than constitutive of interpretation.

This functions akin to Vladimir Jankélévitch’s perspective that music can function as an alibi, its ineffability offering a means of displacement, allowing deeper political or ethical stakes to be deferred or obscured beneath aesthetic pleasure.¹⁷ On platforms like TikTok, this produces a kind of polyphonic tension: sonic elements do not merely accompany the visual but actively shape its interpretation, sometimes reinforcing its message, at other times undermining or redirecting it. To attend to this tension is to listen not for harmony, but for contradiction—for the ways sound complicates, reframes, or distorts what the image appears to convey.

Such bias extends beyond scholarship into platform governance as content moderation systems and algorithmic monitoring tools are overwhelmingly attuned to textual and visual cues, often neglecting—or only minimally accounting for—the role of sound. As a result, the musical underscoring of TikTok videos, which can carry significant ideological or affective weight, frequently escapes scrutiny. By centering sound as a critical axis of meaning-making, this study extends the long-standing critiques of visual bias in media and sound studies by demonstrating how listening operates within algorithmic and affective platform infrastructures.

It is precisely this infrastructural and affective capacity that allows sonic wallpaper to function not only as a medium of cultural expression, but also as a vehicle for harm.

Sonic Hate

Sonic hate, as I use the term here, describes how sound—whether spoken, musical, or ambient—can be mobilized to carry and amplify forms of bigotry and social exclusion. This includes explicit instances, such as slurs embedded in audio clips or mocking vocal distortions, but also more ambient and indirect strategies: tonal mimicry, looping audio memes, and carefully curated musical pairings that cue ideological alignment without overt declaration. The term does not claim novelty so much as it offers a framework for synthesizing work on sonic violence, racialized listening, and the long histories of antisemitic and orientalist sound tropes. What it foregrounds is how hate becomes audible, affectively compelling, and socially transmissible within platforms that reward repetition, circulation, and emotional resonance.

This framework intersects with scholarship on far-right sound cultures and digital extremism, including Liam Gillespie’s theorization of “sonic violence” in white nationalist media and Helena Krobath and Freya Zinovieff’s analysis of neo-Nazi sound memes on Telegram.¹⁸ Yet it departs from many of these models in one crucial way: hate and violence are not synonymous. One is an emotion, a feeling (hate), while the other is an action (violence). Sonic hate emphasizes how sound functions not only to incite or wound, but also to seduce, align, mock, and normalize, especially within algorithmic environments designed to amplify emotional resonance and repetition.

As Agneta Fischer and Eran Halperin argue, hate is not merely an individual feeling but a group-based political emotion rooted in shared perceptions of threat and injustice.¹⁹ Judith Butler similarly shows that injurious expression is performative, yet also subject to resignification.²⁰ On TikTok, sound occupies precisely this unstable terrain: a single audio track can signal belonging, ridicule, parody, or hostility depending on its visual pairing and reception. Sound is thus not indeterminate so much as contextually elastic—ideologically charged yet affectively mobile. These sonic choices mirror the excitable, unstable quality of speech that Butler foregrounds: sound on TikTok is not just an accompaniment, but a performative force capable of shaping meaning, intensifying ideology, and proliferating harm or parody through its very circulation.

Sound also operates as a mechanism of amplification: a triumphant anthem, nostalgic melody, or distorted loop can elevate content into visibility, lending emotional force that exceeds the image alone. These sonic choices do not merely accompany meaning; they inflect interpretation, intensify attention, and increase shareability. In this sense, sound becomes a performative force through which ideology is circulated affectively rather than argued discursively.

Musicologists Suzanne G. Cusick and Lily Hirsch have both demonstrated how sound can be weaponized to produce real corporeal suffering. Cusick’s foundational work on music as torture and Hirsch’s analysis of musical abuse during the Holocaust, U.S. military interrogations, and other carceral contexts underscore how music can function as an instrument of physical domination.²¹ Hirsch also critiques the impulse to shield music from moral scrutiny, noting that attempts to protect its Romantic ideal often obscure the harm done to actual victims: “Music is not the victim.”²² In contrast, the sonic hate explored in this study is not designed to break bodies, but to anesthetize harm, distribute mockery, and normalize dehumanization, resulting in a spread of affective violence across digital platforms in forms that often evade detection or accountability.

Naming culturally specific forms of sonic hate is therefore crucial. The categories that follow are not exhaustive, but illustrative, highlighting how distinct histories of listening and representation shape the ways sound becomes a vehicle for harm. Doing so makes clear that there is no abstract, universal “hate sound.” Rather, different forms of sonic hate draw on distinct historical archives of listening, stereotype, and exclusion. To speak of sonic antisemitism or sonic Islamophobia, for example, is to identify not only a general mechanism of sonic harm, but also the particular genealogies through which certain sounds, voices, and musical signs become marked as illegitimate, suspect, excessive, or dangerous. This approach aligns with recent efforts, such as the Nexus Task Force framework, which emphasize that antisemitism often operates through historically embedded tropes and associations, rather than explicit declaration (as exemplified with the Zelensky TikTok).²³ It also reflects a broader recognition that antisemitism is not static or uniformly distributed but shaped by shifting political contexts and discursive environments.²⁴

Sonic antisemitism draws on long-standing tropes in which Jewish sound is framed as intrusive, excessive, morally corrupt, or aesthetically grotesque. Ruth HaCohen’s concept of the “music libel” is especially useful here, as it identifies a cultural logic through which Jewish sound has historically been imagined as threatening to Christian aural and moral order.²⁵ In digital environments, these associations persist through mocking remixes, exaggerated vocal stylizations, ironic pairings, and caricatured invocations of Jewish musicality. Understanding sonic hate as sonic antisemitism therefore allows us to trace how contemporary platform practices reactivate older histories of aural suspicion and de-legitimation.

Sonic Islamophobia, similarly, mobilizes orientalist listening practices that render Muslim sound as foreign, ominous, excessive, or threatening. This includes distortions of the adhan, ominous underscoring attached to Muslim figures, or stereotyped musical markers coded as vaguely “Middle Eastern.” Scholars such as Roshanak Kheshti, Charles Hirschkind, and Isaac Weiner demonstrate that these forms of listening are embedded in broader regimes of surveillance, discipline, and cultural control.²⁶ Framing such phenomena as sonic Islamophobia clarifies that the issue is not simply hostile representation, but the racialized governance of who may sound in public, and under what conditions.

These dynamics become especially visible in platform moderation. The Rutgers Law School report Presumptively Antisemitic shows how Islamophobic logics are often mobilized to discredit Muslim or pro-Palestinian expression, treating such content as inherently suspect regardless of its actual content.²⁷ These patterns extend to sonic media. In May 2021, for instance, TikToker @emmasworld.101 posted a sea-shanty-style musical rendition expressing solidarity with Palestine (image 5), drawing on the viral ShantyTok format.²⁸

Image 5.

@emmasworld.101’s pro-Palestine sea shanty TikTok.

Following the events of October 7, 2023, the video resurfaced and went viral—but TikTok removed its audio (image 6), effectively stripping it of its sonic and affective force.

Image 6.

@emmasworld.101 Comment Feed Showing Removed Audio, “This Sound Isn’t Available.”

The platform’s response effectively erased a mode of peaceful musical protest through algorithmic censorship, echoing the exact structure described in the Rutgers report: A logic in which Palestinian or Muslim-affiliated expression is treated as presumptively dangerous or hateful, regardless of actual content. Just as sonic antisemitism operates through mockery, distortion, or ironic signaling of Jewish identity, sonic Islamophobia functions through the stigmatization and suppression of Islamic and pro-Palestinian sound. These are not symmetrical in content, but structurally parallel in function. Both rely on long-standing sound tropes tied to racialized and religious difference, and both are increasingly shaped, distorted, or silenced by platform moderation logic.

In this light, the muting of @emmasworld.101’s sonic wallpaper from her TikTok is not merely an act of content removal, it is an act of sonic governance. It reveals how algorithmic systems adjudicate which voices are heard and which are silenced, often in ways that reproduce existing hierarchies of power. While sonic hate is often assumed to be emitted—audible, affective, and aggressive—it can also be imposed, taking the form of infrastructural silence that erases solidarity, anesthetizes critique, and recasts protest as threat. Within this framework, sonic hate is not only a matter of what is said or played, but of whose sound is allowed to circulate, and whose is rendered inaudible under the guise of neutrality.

Sonic hate need not be loud, explicit, or even intentional. Some of its most effective and insidious forms emerge through tone, repetition, irony, and auditory gesture. The same mechanisms that make TikTok’s audio layer feel intimate, immersive, and emotionally resonant also render it a powerful vehicle for encoding harm. Sound’s affective pull can naturalize violence, aestheticize cruelty, and encode exclusion, not by stating hate outright, but by shaping how it feels.

Returning to Stoever, listening is never neutral; it is conditioned by histories of race, power, and social discipline. Sonic hate builds on this premise. It uses sound not merely to accompany hatred but to perform it, constructing belonging or exclusion through emotional resonance, tonal styling, and platform-driven repetition.²⁹ On TikTok, these performances often take the form of ironic sound memes, voice filters, or exaggerated inflections that transform hate into affective atmospheres. The result is not simply a message, but a mood: one that is stylized, ambient, and algorithmically amplified.

Sonic Contagion

Sonic contagion names the mechanism by which sound circulates across platforms as an affective and algorithmic force. On TikTok, audio does not move primarily because of what it signifies, but because of how it feels—how easily it loops, syncs, and adheres to other forms of content. As recent conversations on circulation have suggested, “in the digital age, small gestures like sharing a meme or a video can significantly strengthen emotional bonds.”³⁰ Sonic contagion describes a platform-native mode of transmission in which ideologically charged sound spreads not through argument or persuasion, but through repetition, resonance, and affective uptake. In this system, meaning is not prior to circulation; it is produced through it. Further, the same affective and algorithmic conditions that enable circulation also intensify attachment, making such content not only highly shareable but increasingly difficult to resist—a perilous dynamic when what spreads is harmful.³¹ Whereas sonic wallpaper describes the infrastructural role of sound as a connective and memetic layer, and sonic hate identifies how sound encodes and aestheticizes harm, sonic contagion explains how such sound travels, mutates, and persists.

To frame this dynamic, I draw on musicologist Paula Harper’s concept of “viral musicking” (an extension of Christopher Small’s “musicking”): “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.”³² Harper extends Small’s concept by emphasizing that to take part in “viral musicking” can extend from the act of listening to those of remixing, and by doing so, pass on and “infect” new “hosts.”³³ Harper’s theory, grounded in Priscilla Wald’s theory of the outbreak narrative, which conceptualizes contagion not as a metaphor but as a cultural logic through which forms spread, mutate, and acquire meaning through transmission. In this model, circulation is not secondary to meaning; it is the very process through which meaning is generated. Sound, in this context, behaves less like a message to be interpreted than like a medium that gains force through its capacity to move. Harper’s theory argues that virality should be understood not as metaphor but as structure: a process of emergence, mutation, and spread that operates independently of authorial control or stable meaning.³⁴

Sara Ahmed has argued that affect is shaped by “histories of contact,” such that what moves us is conditioned by prior encounters, attachments, and forms of recognition.³⁵ In digital environments, this helps explain why certain sounds are more likely to circulate: they resonate with familiar affective registers, enabling users to recognize, reuse, and reattach them across contexts. Affect, in this sense, does not simply accompany circulation—it propels it, operating as an intensity that moves between bodies, objects, and platforms, pushing content into motion. Recent scholarship on the role of the consumer and content circulation posits that at its core, circulation and consumer drive is grounded in “objects imbued with affect.”³⁶

Sonic contagion builds on these insights to show how sound circulates not only because it can be reused, but because affect operates as a mobilizing force within digital networks, driving repetition, recombination, and uptake. Sound spreads not simply through its explicit use of sonic legibility, but through its capacity to be felt and embodied, as well as remixed and reanimated across contexts—embedding ideological content within forms that are easy to share and increasingly normalized through circulation.

Crucially, sonic contagion is indifferent to belief. Sound does not move from convinced subject to convinced subject; it moves from listener to listener, from scroller to sharer, often detached from its original context. In this sense, users function less as interpreters and more as vectors, while the algorithm acts as a host environment that optimizes for repetition and spread. Hate persists not because it persuades, but because it circulates efficiently within these conditions.

When sonic hate is transmitted contagiously, then complicity no longer requires endorsement or even recognition. Harm can be reproduced through participation in trends, humor, or aesthetic play. A sound may be used ironically, playfully, or without awareness of its origins, yet still contribute to the amplification of harmful associations. In this way, sonic antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of sonic hate survive platform regulation not through concealment alone, but through their capacity to become ambient—embedded within everyday practices of listening, remixing, and sharing.

Sonic contagion therefore requires a shift in analytical focus. Rather than asking whether content is explicitly hateful, we must attend to how sound circulates, how it accumulates affective force through repetition, and how platform infrastructures reward what is engaging over what is ethical. Hate, in this framework, is not only something that is expressed; it is something that spreads. It becomes a beat rather than a message—viral not because it convinces, but because it moves.

It is important to note that neither sonic wallpaper nor sonic contagion are inherently or exclusively vehicles for harm. The same mechanisms that enable the circulation of sonic hate—looping, affective resonance, and participatory reuse—also facilitate what might be understood as forms of sonic care: expressions of solidarity, collective mourning, or political alignment that travel through shared auditory frameworks. For example, the widespread circulation of Paris Paloma’s “Labour” has functioned as a feminist sonic rallying point across platforms, enabling users to articulate experiences of gendered labor, exhaustion, and resistance through a common affective and musical vocabulary.³⁷ In such cases, sound operates not as a vehicle for exclusion, but for recognition and affiliation.

Rather than positioning sonic care as a simple opposite to sonic hate, however, this framework emphasizes that both emerge from the same infrastructural and affective conditions. The distinction lies not in the mechanism of circulation, but in the histories, associations, and orientations that shape how sound is taken up, interpreted, and mobilized. Attending to sonic contagion thus requires not only identifying how harm spreads, but also recognizing how these same dynamics can sustain forms of connection, empathy, and collective expression.

Listening Practices: Sonic Participation and Viral Musicking

In approaching sonic hate and contagion, it is essential to foreground listening not merely as reception, but as a mode of participation. On platforms like TikTok, listening is an active, embodied, and socially meaningful practice through which users engage, interpret, and recirculate sound. This reframing builds on work such as Kate Crawford’s early intervention in social media studies, which shifts attention from “having a voice” to the often-overlooked practices of listening online.³⁸ Writing in 2009 in the context of Twitter, Crawford proposes listening as a framework for understanding online attention, identifying modes such as background, reciprocal, and delegated listening as key forms of participation within networked environments.

While developed prior to the rise of TikTok, Crawford’s model is particularly generative for understanding contemporary platform cultures, where users are immersed in continuous streams of sound and often participate without producing original content. What Crawford describes as background listening resonates with TikTok’s looping audio environment, while reciprocal and delegated listening emerge through practices of remixing, reposting, and algorithmic amplification. Listening, in this sense, is not passive consumption but a distributed, platform-conditioned act.

This perspective extends the framework of Harper’s viral musicking outlined above, shifting the emphasis from sound as participatory object to listening as participatory practice. Viral musicking describes how sound circulates through affective and algorithmic infrastructures, while platformed listening describes how users inhabit, interpret, and reproduce those circulations through everyday engagement. Listening on TikTok is not uniform. A user might engage a sound because it is catchy, because it signals affiliation with a particular group or ideology, or because it is associated with a recognizable creator or trend. These modes of listening are layered and fluid, often coexisting within a single act of engagement. Listening thus becomes a key site of meaning-making, where affect, identity, and participation converge, similar to Robin James’s theory of acoustic biopolitics, which examines how sound governs populations, moods, and aesthetic norms within neoliberal systems. As James argues, sound is not merely expressive but calculative: it organizes social relations through repetition, optimization, and affective management. Platforms like TikTok reward sonic content not for its truth or ethical clarity, but for its capacity to generate engagement—for being smooth, resonant, and repeatable. TikTok’s algorithmic infrastructure does not detect ideology; it detects attention, engagement, and repeatability. Sonic antisemitism and other forms of sonic hate thus persist not despite platform logic, but because of it.

As Jonathan Sterne and Elena Razlogova suggest, contemporary audio circulation is shaped by forms of infrastructural listening in which sound is optimized not only for human perception, but for algorithmic systems and affective economies. The question, then, is not only what is heard, but how sound is rendered audible, affective, and platform-ready. Taken together, these frameworks position listening as a central analytic category for understanding how sound operates within social media environments. It is through these practices of listening—distributed, affective, and platform-conditioned—that sonic hate becomes legible and, crucially, circulatory. To demonstrate this, I now turn to four typologies that illustrate the primary mechanisms through which sonic hate circulates on TikTok.

Typologies of Hate

To better understand how sonic hate circulates on platforms like TikTok, I propose four primary typologies: 1) Direct Lyrical Reference; 2) Emotive Suggestion; 3) Contextual Juxtaposition; and 4) Sonic Dog Whistles. While each operates differently, all four function as mechanisms of sonic contagion, allowing hate to circulate without overt declaration.

1. Direct Lyrical Reference

The first typology, direct lyrical reference, names sonic hate in its most explicit form: when sound does not obscure or veil its ideological message, but instead articulates hate speech, dehumanization, eliminationist rhetoric, or fantasies of vengeance with semantic clarity. Unlike subtler forms of sonic hate that rely on affective suggestion, irony, or aesthetic displacement, this mode is defined by its refusal to disguise intent—often delivered with a kind of boastful directness. Such examples frequently circulate within genres like drill and trap, where high rhythmic intensity, militarized beats, and shouted refrains amplify the affective charge of the lyrics. When paired with virality on platforms like TikTok, this explicitness becomes not a liability but a feature, enabling rapid circulation and normalization through repetition.

Example: Ness & Stilla, “Harbu Darbu”

The drill-trap single “Harbu Darbu” by Israeli artists Ness and Stilla, released on November 14, 2023, is a paradigmatic example. The title itself—derived from the Arabic ḥarb ū darb (“war and strike”)—signals the track’s aggressive ethos. Produced in the global drill style, the song features pounding percussion, high-frequency snares, and chant-like repetition, all of which heighten its combative tone. But what sets “Harbu Darbu” apart is not merely its sonic aggression, rather, it is the convergence of genre, performance, and circulation that transforms it from a war anthem into something more ideologically operative.

While drill has often been associated with hypermasculinity, criminal bravado, and performative violence, “Harbu Darbu” narrows the distance between fantasy and literal expression. As Forrest Stuart observes in his study of drill’s cultural dynamics, the genre often functions through the performance of threat, with artists crafting exaggerated personas to gain visibility, assert status, and navigate competitive attention economies.³⁹ Tricia Rose, in Black Noise, further emphasizes hip-hop’s deployment of hyperbole and spectacle as rhetorical devices, noting that rap often weaponizes exaggeration to confront and challenge dominant discourse.⁴⁰ In “Harbu Darbu” these performative qualities are applied with minimal figurative buffer, such that stylistic conventions—exaggeration, repetition, incantatory tone—are not only aesthetic, but declarative in their ideological clarity. In the opening translated line, “A bunch of fucking mice coming out of the tunnels,” Palestinians are likened to vermin, a metaphor historically used to frame targeted populations as subhuman. A subsequent line, “Tfii, you children of Amalek,” references a biblical archetype in which Amalek represents an eternal enemy of the Jewish people, invoking a lineage of moral and theological antagonism.⁴¹ Within religious discourse, the figure of Amalek is often cited in discussions of sanctioned violence. Here, it operates not as allegory, but as a mechanism of classification.

The chorus adopts the structure of a military cadence, naming elite Israeli units—Golani, Shiryon, Givati—each punctuated by the chant “one, two, shot.” This structure produces a call-and-response effect that invites listeners into the performance of martial solidarity. The repetition reinforces both sonic and affective cohesion, mirroring the formal training rituals of military units while blurring the line between audience and participant. The beat itself mimics the rhythm of synchronized movement and collective action. Notably, this is not the first time drill aesthetics have been employed to articulate nationalist or eliminationist ideas. The genre’s performative intensity, often characterized by roleplay and heightened aggression, lends itself to ideological amplification. As Noriko Manabe has observed, when popular music adopts sonic codes associated with militarization or masculinity, it can function as a tool of ideological purification, flattening complexity into a singular emotional narrative.⁴² In “Harbu Darbu,” drill’s characteristic bravado is channeled toward a vocabulary of retribution, with minimal aesthetic distance between the rhetorical posture and the ideological claim.

In the third verse, the repeated phrase “every bad person comes for his punishment in the end” cycles through a list of public figures, including political leaders and cultural celebrities. Among those named are Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa, and Mia Khalifa, figures not associated with militant activity, but rather with public solidarity for Palestinians. Their inclusion extends the rhetorical frame beyond physical combat to encompass symbolic critique, suggesting an expanded target of affective threat.

If drill often allows artists to adopt fictionalized personas, “Harbu Darbu” complicates that framework by reducing the gap between aesthetic exaggeration and literal implication. The formal attributes of hip-hop—persona construction, lyrical elevation, and narrative inflation—are present, but the tone remains starkly declarative. This convergence of performative genre and explicit rhetoric raises questions about how music can operate not only as symbolic expression but also as disclosure: a way of articulating sentiments that might otherwise remain unspoken in formal discourse. In this sense, the track edges into a sonic form of evidentiary speech.

The song’s broader impact, however, is shaped not only by its lyrics but by its circulation. On TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, “Harbu Darbu” has been used as backing audio for first-person shooter gameplay, celebratory montages, and meme formats. In one example (image 7), the track plays over footage captioned “They said free Palestine 😂,” as national flag emojis scroll across the screen.

Image 7.

TikTok underscored by “Harbu Darbu.”

In these cases, the music functions as affective infrastructure: it sets tone, animates meaning, and cues alignment. Stripped of its original context and repurposed through meme logic, the track facilitates a form of participatory spectatorship that is less about political ideology and more about affective identification. This, in turn, transforms ideological content into a viral auditory experience.

What “Harbu Darbu” makes particularly legible is how direct incitement can be embedded within recognizable genre frameworks, how the formal codes of drill, with their percussive repetition, martial bravado, and rhythmic escalation, can serve as conduits for ideological expression. This logic recalls the example introduced at the outset: Ye’s “Heil Hitler.” Though emerging from a different cultural context, that track similarly employs drill aesthetics, militarized beats, chant-like refrains, and exaggerated vocal delivery, to articulate a message whose virality depends as much on form as on content. Even after being reissued as “Hallelujah,” with its explicit references scrubbed, the sonic infrastructure remained intact: the mood, tempo, and affective cues preserved the emotional charge of the original. In both cases, we see how genre conventions and platform circulation work together to aestheticize hate, making it not only sayable but loopable. The question, then, is not just what is being said but how sonic form enables hate to persist even when its language is withdrawn. Drill does not obscure the message; it amplifies it. And in doing so, it transforms ideology into rhythm, affect, and repetition.

2. Emotive Suggestion

My second typology, emotive suggestion, operates through mood, tone, and framing. These examples do not rely on slurs or overt hate speech but instead leverage affective cues, such as ironic music, tonal mockery, or exaggerated scoring, to render a subject laughable, menacing, or absurd. In this typology, sound becomes a tool of ridicule and delegitimization, suggesting threat or inferiority through stylistic manipulation rather than declarative language. As introduced earlier in the case of the viral TikTok depicting Zelensky in the Oval Office, the sound functions not to insult directly but to cue viewers into a framework of mistrust and mockery. It transforms the political visual into an object of derision, weaponizing familiar sonic tropes to encode alignment without explanation. This is sonic hate at its most insidious: ambient, ironic, and plausible deniable. It cloaks itself in humor, satire, or aesthetic stylization, thereby distancing the content from accountability while still encoding hostility.

A second striking example appears in a TikTok excerpted from a televised interview between Piers Morgan and a Muslim political candidate. During the exchange, Morgan pointedly asks: “Do you want to bring Sharia law to the UK?” The candidate responds calmly, stating that his campaign seeks to support Islamic values in the Muslim world and that he rejects the “caricatures” being imposed on him.⁴³ Yet it is precisely at this moment—when he says the word “caricatures”—that the video overlays a looping ‘oom-pah’ cartoon score. The rhythm, long associated with slapstick comedy and circus scenes, reframes his self-presentation as laughable. Its duple meter and low-brass timbral associations historically signal buffoonery and bodily exaggeration, predisposing the listener to interpret the speaker as unserious. In effect, the sound performs the very caricature he attempts to resist. It collapses the seriousness of the moment into farce, turning an act of clarification into a spectacle of ridicule.

The ‘oom-pah’ rhythm functions as a sonic annotation, cuing an emotional response that overrides the content of the candidate’s words. As musicologist Daniel Goldmark has noted, such rhythmic patterns are foundational to how animation scores mark characters as clumsy or foolish.⁴⁴ On TikTok, where sounds are modular and easily reapplied, these cues gain a new elasticity, they can be attached not to fictional characters, but to real individuals, often to diminish or discredit. The result is not a declarative statement, but a mood, a sonic signal that guides how a subject should be felt.

What emerges is a form of affective shorthand: sound as a cue for distrust, absurdity, or contempt. Even when no explicit claim is made, these sonic textures structure the viewer’s emotional orientation toward the subject. The chyron on-screen—“EXTREMIST ISLAMIC CANDIDATE” (image 8)—may visually foreground bias, but it is the music that organizes the interpretive frame; the affective logic is internalized through tone.

Image 8.

TikTok video captioned “EXTREMIST ISLAMIC CANDIDATE.”

In this way, emotive suggestion exemplifies how sound mediates meaning without assertion. Through rhythm, tone, and stylistic association, audio becomes a soft infrastructure for shaping reception, it does not explain or accuse; it implies and insinuates. In digital environments where sonic fragments circulate freely, these affective framings become portable: capable of attaching suspicion to individuals or groups through repetition alone.

This example also illustrates how sonic Islamophobia circulates in platform-native form, not through overt declarations, but through affective dissonance, in which tone and musical framing pre-condition how a subject is received. The candidate’s composure is not directly challenged in speech but sonically reframed through cues that render him absurd. The sound does not name hostility; it orients the listener toward it. Returning to Ahmed’s work on circulation and affect, she proposes a theory of “non-performativity,” the absence of direct articulation does not neutralize power; rather, affective forms of communication often do the very work that speech refuses.⁴⁵ In this way, emotive suggestion functions as a sonic mechanism through which suspicion and ridicule circulate ambiently embedded not in language, but in tone.

3. Contextual Juxtaposition

Contextual juxtaposition refers to a mode of sonic antisemitism in which the hateful valence does not originate from the sound’s original content but from its surrounding semiotic environment, what the sound is made to mean through its pairing with imagery, filters, gestures, or textual overlays. This mode reveals how digital platforms operate as multimodal sites of re-signification, where cultural artifacts are stripped from their original contexts and re-embedded within new affective logics. The sound itself may remain ostensibly neutral, even celebratory, but it is reoriented toward derision through strategic visual and affective coupling.

This typology underscores the convergence of sonic contagion and sonic hate. Following Sterne and Razlogova’s framing of “infrastructural listening,” platform-native listening is conditioned by systems that prioritize emotional efficiency, repetition, and aesthetic clarity rather than historical accountability or semantic integrity.⁴⁶ Within this infrastructure, sound becomes pliable, circulating not as fixed cultural memory, but as raw material for meme-based transformation. TikTok facilitates this form of semiotic drift, where a recognizable track accrues new meaning by virtue of its audiovisual context. The result is not merely remix, but reorientation: a process through which sound is made to mock, flatten, or racialize under the guise of entertainment.

A compelling instance of this is the 2021 TikTok trend that paired the musical number “If I Were a Rich Man” from the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof with the Expressify filter: a face-distorting effect that exaggerates features like the nose, lips, and chin (image 9).⁴⁷

Image 9.

Tiktok’s “Expressify” filter underscored with “If I Were a Rich Man.”

Fiddler, composed by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and based on Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories, has long served as a cultural touchstone within Jewish memory and American theatrical tradition.⁴⁸ As Alisa Solomon argues in Wonder of Wonders, the musical’s legacy is rooted in its capacity to render Jewish life with both emotional gravitas and accessible humor, offering a narrative of diasporic endurance that resonated across generations.⁴⁹ Its melodies—especially “If I Were a Rich Man”—have achieved a form of cultural saturation, instantly legible as sonic markers of Jewishness.

This process of re-signification can be understood through Roland Barthes’s concept of myth, wherein cultural symbols are emptied of their original historical meaning and recoded within dominant ideological frameworks. Barthes argued that myth operates by stripping a sign of its historical specificity and re-presenting it as a seemingly natural, universally understood symbol within dominant cultural frameworks.⁵⁰ In the case of Fiddler on the Roof, its iconic number “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes less a trace of Jewish theatrical heritage and more a mythic signifier of “Jewishness” in the abstract, reduced to a sonic shorthand that can be remixed, exaggerated, and ridiculed. Limor Shifman’s theory of memes as units of cultural transmission shaped by “repetition with variation” further clarifies how this mythologized sound becomes embedded within platform logic.⁵¹ Each TikTok that pairs the song with the Expressify filter contributes a variation that deepens the sonic association with caricature, even while individual users claim playful or ironic intent. Through this recursive structure, meme-based platforms normalize harmful recontextualizations under the guise of creative iteration, reifying racialized tropes while shielding their ideological content behind the aesthetics of remix culture. Users activate the filter while the song plays, transforming their faces into exaggerated, stereotypically “Jewish” features—hooked noses, receding hairlines, leering smiles—mirroring antisemitic imagery from Nazi propaganda, such as the children’s book Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), or more recently, memes like the “Happy Merchant” (image 10) or the infamous 2014 Süddeutsche Zeitung (image 11) cartoon of Mark Zuckerberg.⁵²

Image 10.

“Happy Merchant” meme (2015).⁵³

Image 11.

Süddeutsche Zeitung cartoon of Mark Zuckerberg (2014).

This convergence of mythic simplification and memetic repetition lays the groundwork for affective reorientation. In this case, Fiddler’s melody, once saturated with cultural specificity and diasporic meaning, becomes emotionally contaminated through its repeated pairing with antisemitic caricature. The sound itself acquires a new affective charge—one that resonates with mockery, suspicion, and exclusion—despite its surface neutrality. What emerges, then, is not simply a distortion of representation, but a redistribution of affect: a shift in what is felt, by whom, and toward what ends.

What is ultimately at stake here is the erosion of cultural memory through the ironic infrastructures of platform humor. When songs embedded in diasporic identity and historical trauma are refashioned into tools of mockery, the boundary between recognition and ridicule collapses. TikTok’s remix culture thus becomes a site where sonic legibility is weaponized—where familiarity breeds not empathy, but caricature.

4. Sonic Dog Whistles

Sonic dog whistles refer to the strategic use of sound—musical, verbal, or ambient—that encodes bigotry in ways legible only to an in-group while appearing neutral to broader audiences. Unlike direct slurs or overt hate speech, dog whistles operate through indirection: they rely on tone, timing, phonetic play, and culturally coded references that evade algorithmic moderation and lean on plausible deniability. These aural signals circulate affectively, not declaratively, inviting recognition through repetition, stylization, and context rather than content. They thrive within the platform logic of TikTok, where meaning is modular and memetic: any given sound can be recontextualized, reframed, and recirculated as part of an ever-expanding semiotic web. Returning to Stoever, listening is not a neutral act; what is heard, and ignored, is shared by the “listening ear,” a dominant auditory framework that encodes racial bias into structures of perception.⁵⁴

A striking example emerges in a TikTok video in which a user records themselves watching another person’s post. The original video cycles through three seemingly disconnected images: (1) the Liberty Bell; (2) a shell; and (3) a Black man eating watermelon (image 12). The viewer vocalizes the phrase “well, well, well” repeatedly while attempting to type it as a comment, prompting a warning from TikTok’s moderation system. The user responds audibly with “Get back to work!” followed by the sound of a whip crack.⁵⁵

Image 12.

TikTok linking “well, well, well” to racialized violence.

Individually, these images and sounds may appear innocuous. Taken together, however, they enact a racialized logic through sonic and visual juxtaposition. The sequence “Liberty Bell” and “shell” forms a phonetic cue—“bell–shell”—which, when followed by the watermelon image, mobilizes long-standing stereotypes rooted in minstrelsy and postbellum racist iconography. The vocalized “well, well, well,” widely recognizable in certain online subcultures, is itself a loaded sonic signifier.⁵⁶ Originally used in The Boondocks as a parodic imitation of the character Uncle Ruckus—a satire of internalized anti-Black racism—the phrase has been reappropriated in digital spaces as a racially charged meme.⁵⁷ It signals to in-group viewers that the subject is to be mocked or degraded, priming audiences for implicit racial commentary.

This strategy exemplifies the limitations of platform moderation. TikTok may flag a comment for potential harm, but the audio itself—absent any overt hate speech—remains unregulated and available for reuse and underscores the limits of platform moderation. While TikTok may flag comments for potential harm, the underlying audio—free of explicit hate speech—often circulates unchecked. This illustrates what James describes as acoustic biopolitics: the platform doesn’t merely reflect social values but actively engineers them by amplifying sonic cues that maximize affective engagement.⁵⁸ In this model, sound is governed not by moral or semantic content, but by performative and structural features: catchiness, cadence, recognizability. What circulates, then, is not necessarily what is ethical or explicit, but what is affectively sticky. Sonic dog whistles persist not despite the algorithm, but because of it.

These dog whistles exemplify sonic contagion, while they may not go viral in the traditional sense, their potency lies in their reproducibility and emotional charge. They are designed to be echoed, repurposed, and memetically reactivated across contexts, often detaching from their original referent while preserving their ideological function. In this way, sonic dog whistles blur into sonic wallpaper, ambient, normalized, and infrastructurally embedded into platform culture. Their spread relies not on the listener’s conscious assent, but on the ambient absorption of repeated signals, structures, and cues. The whipping sound and phrase “get back to work” mimic the sonic violence of slavery but do so through aesthetic stylization and affective distancing. TikTok flags the comment as potentially offensive, but the user is still able to post the video using the same audio, showcasing the platform’s failure to recognize how hate operates through sound.⁵⁹

Ultimately, sonic dog whistles reveal how digital hate is increasingly aesthetic rather than declarative. It is not just what is said, but how it sounds—and how it is made to feel—that governs its circulation. These mechanisms underscore the need for an ethics of listening attuned not only to what platforms detect, but to what they amplify.

Conclusion

Studying hate on TikTok demands rethinking how sound operates within digital infrastructures. What distinguishes the platform is not only its speed or scale, but the centrality of its audio architecture: a system where meaning emerges through loops, remixes, and repetition. Rather than treating TikTok as a site of audiovisual expression, this article has approached it as a sonic architecture, where hate is not merely voiced but reverberates. Sonic hate and sonic contagion are not abstract metaphors but material conditions—affective techniques embedded in the platform’s design to curate attention, emotion, and circulation.

Platforms persist in treating audio as aesthetic garnish rather than a vehicle for political communication. Yet, as this study demonstrates, sonic elements—inflection, musical cues, ambient noise—are often the carriers of affective violence. Whether through explicit lyrics, ironic juxtapositions, racialized caricature, or algorithmically rewarded repetition, sound functions as a socially resonant medium of hate.

TikTok’s participatory and multimodal structure further complicates detection. Audio is frequently decoupled from its original context, re-textualized with new visuals or captions, and re-circulated across subcultures. Meaning becomes emergent, not fixed. This fluidity, combined with the algorithm’s preference for emotional resonance and high engagement, enables hate to camouflage as humor, trend, or vibe. Sonic dog whistles and racialized irony often escape moderation because they do not conform to systems trained on explicit slurs or semantic cues.

Even mechanisms ostensibly designed to protect users—like the “Report Sound” function—fail in practice. During my ethnographic research, I submitted numerous examples of sonic hate for review; none were removed. This is not an isolated oversight, but an infrastructural blind spot. TikTok’s moderation systems and community standards are not attuned to how harm is encoded sonically. Audio is either ignored or aestheticized, rarely treated as ideologically charged or politically operative.

This article intervenes in an underexamined dimension of platform harm: the sonic circulation of hate as an affective and algorithmic force. While scholars have made vital advances in understanding visual and textual hate, we have yet to fully contend with the political and affective complexities of music and sound. Addressing sonic hate requires methodological shifts—away from discrete content analysis and toward listening as critical practice. It also demands regulatory frameworks that treat virality not simply as success, but as a vector for harm.

Treating sound as infrastructural rather than ornamental has implications beyond TikTok. For music and sound studies, it builds on long-standing interventions that have treated sound as a material and affective force and extends those insights into the domain of platform governance. At stake is not only how harm is heard but how it moves. On platforms like TikTok, sound does not remain attached to a single context; it circulates through repetition, reuse, and algorithmic amplification. Audio is looped, reattached to new images, and made available for endless recombination, allowing affective forms to travel widely while shedding their original context. It is through this mobility that sonic contagion operates.

These findings also raise urgent questions for platform regulation and pedagogy. Content moderation systems that privilege textual and visual detection will continue to overlook the affective and sonic dimensions of harm. Addressing this gap requires not only advances in audio recognition technologies, but a conceptual shift in how harm is defined and identified. Pedagogically, this underscores the need to teach critical listening as a form of media literacy—one that attends not only to what is said, but to how it sounds, circulates, and conditions response. To listen critically today is not only to attend to what sound means, but to track how it circulates—how it sticks, spreads, and accumulates force across platformed environments. While circulation and reuse are not new, they are increasingly intensified by platform infrastructures, carrying harm in forms that feel familiar, pleasurable, and increasingly ordinary.