Abstract Summary
In the digital media era, social media changes people’s behavior and their use and experience of the city in everyday life. Being in the city for many people now is marked by many social media posts. Meanwhile, social media changes places through peoples’ behavior as well. The phenomenon of the rise of social-media-popular places has garnered significant attention in recent years. For example, tourists line up for hours at a fries shop in Amsterdam because of a TikTok video. This phenomenon brings transformation and new strategies in those social-media-popular places and cities. Some places are already experiencing the problems of tourism-induced gentrification, overtourism, overcrowding, infrastructure strain and environmental impact after being popular. Moreover, the format of images and short videos are replacing the format of texts and audios in traditional media era, emerging social media platforms such as TikTok have not been paid sufficient attention yet. Based on those, this paper conducts an in-depth case study on the impact of TikTok on social-media-popular places in Amsterdam, by mapping the popular places and analysing social media data. At the macro level of city scale, this paper identifies the attributes of social-media-popular places through TikTok posts in Amsterdam and Amsterdam built environment data, maps and uses machine learning to cluster the spatial-temporal distribution of social-media-popular places. After that, at the micro level of place scale, this paper analyzes specific events and cases, for example, a spontaneous event about the long queue of tourists attracted and induced by TikTok at the fries shop in Amsterdam. First, it analyzes the whole process during the spontaneous event by tracking the posts and the number of views, likes, shares, comments, and engagement rates of the TikTok videos. Second, it studies the network of actors and their behaviors and sentiment through different time by users’ information, and marketing/branding keywords in the comments, and hashtags, check-ins, posts sentiment related to the destination on TikTok. Third, it finds what aspects of places changed through the process. Finally, this paper provides digital placemaking strategies for social-media-induced overtourism in Amsterdam.
