Communicative Accommodation and Perceived Cyberbullying Victimization on TikTok in Uganda

Abstract

This study analyzed how communicative accommodation strategies influence perceived cyberbullying victimization among university students who create content on TikTok in Uganda. Grounded in Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), the study examined convergence, divergence, overaccommodation, and underaccommodation as predictors of perceived cyberbullying victimization, and examined the moderating role of digital resilience. A quantitative, cross-sectional design underpinned by the positivist paradigm was employed on a stratified random sample of 372 undergraduate students aged 18–25 drawn from Makerere University (n = 296) and Uganda Christian University Mukono (n = 76). Data was collected using a structured, self-administered Likert-scale questionnaire. Overaccommodation was the only strategy to significantly predict perceived cyberbullying victimization at both the bivariate level (r = .219, p < .001) and in hierarchical regression after controlling for demographics (β = .222, p < .001), with accommodation strategies collectively explaining meaningful incremental variance (ΔR2 = .058, p < .001). Convergence, divergence, and underaccommodation were non-significant predictors, challenging the universality of CAT's social approval hypothesis in high-convergence-saturation digital environments. Digital resilience significantly moderated the convergence– victimization relationship (b = .171, p = .001) and showed a trend toward buffering the overaccommodation–victimization relationship across resilience levels, though the interaction did not reach significance. No significant differences were found by gender, academic year, or posting frequency, indicating that victimization is driven more by communicative behavior than by demographic characteristics. The study

v extends CAT into a multimodal, algorithm-driven, performative social media context and provides the first quantitative, CAT-informed evidence on communicative predictors of cyberbullying victimization among university TikTok creators in Uganda. The findings concluded that cyberbullying victimization is not merely a function of who students are but of how they communicate, with communicative inauthenticity, the defining feature of overaccommodation as the most significant predictor. The findings suggest integrating communicative self-awareness into university digital literacy curricula, developing digital resilience programmes for active content creators, and advocating for platform moderation policies that reduce algorithmic pressure toward inauthentic accommodation.