The team used netnography, a qualitative method that adapts ethnographic fieldwork to online communities, to observe how Sufi teachings circulate on the platform. Between November 2023 and February 2024, the researchers manually reviewed content from ten influential Sufism-focused TikTok accounts, selected through purposive sampling based on strict engagement thresholds: each account needed at least 10,000 followers, thousands of likes, between 10,000 and 3 million viewers, more than 1,000 shares and at least 100 comments. From these accounts, the team identified the five most-viewed videos each, producing a dataset of 50 videos. They also extracted the five most relevant and shared comments from every video, yielding 250 audience comments that were analysed thematically to understand how viewers interpreted what they watched.

The technical analysis revealed a striking asymmetry between what audiences watch and what they internalise. Philosophical Sufism, or tasawuf falsafi, which explores metaphysical questions about God, existence and the soul through intellectual contemplation and allegorical symbolism, dominated visibility: 58 percent of the most-viewed videos fell into this category, and 69 percent of those centred on the rationalisation of metaphysical matters such as longing for God and the nature of divine closeness. Ethical Sufism, or tasawuf akhlaqi, which emphasises moral behaviour and character development, accounted for the remaining 42 percent. Yet when the researchers examined the comment sections, the deepest personal transformations clustered around ethical content, suggesting that abstract, visually arresting material travels furthest through the platform’s recommendation systems while concrete, practice-oriented messages penetrate more deeply into viewers’ lives.

The authors interpret this split through the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a well-established framework in persuasion psychology that distinguishes between peripheral and central routes of information processing. Philosophical Sufism content, packaged with evocative visuals, music and atmospheric scenes, captures attention through the peripheral route, generating high exposure and shares without necessarily prompting deep cognitive engagement. Ethical Sufism, by contrast, delivers actionable moral guidance that viewers process through the central route, producing stronger interpretation and internalisation. The finding carries a broader implication for digital religion research: what gains prominence on an algorithmic platform does not necessarily correspond to what proves most meaningful for users, pointing to a layered process of religious mediation in which visibility and impact follow different logics.

The content itself draws on a rich multimedia toolkit rooted in Sufi tradition. The videos incorporate background music, instrumental passages, dhikr chants and shalawat, the devotional venerations of the Prophet Muhammad, echoing the classical practice of as-sama, or spiritual listening, through which Sufis have long used music to cultivate closeness to God. Visual elements include illustrations, quotations from canonical figures such as Jalaluddin Rumi and Imam Al-Ghazali, and the expressive gestures and facial expressions of contemporary preachers. Viewers cited four main reasons for engaging with the content: the reputation of the scholarly figure, the topic discussed, the style of delivery and the richness of the media features. Notably, although Indonesian scholars appeared more frequently among the referenced sources, videos featuring internationally recognised figures such as Rumi averaged roughly 2.5 million views compared with about 478,000 for videos featuring local scholars, a fivefold engagement gap that underscores the global pull of the tradition’s most famous names.

The study also mapped the content against the classical Sufi taxonomy of maqamat, the spiritual stages a seeker pursues, and ahwal, the spiritual states received as gifts. Ma’rifah, or experiential knowledge of God, was the most represented stage at 22.6 percent of coded content, followed by mahabbah, deep love, at 16.1 percent and tawakkal, trust in God, at 14.5 percent. Among the states viewers reported encountering, muqarabah, the feeling of closeness to God, dominated at 21.3 percent. Perhaps most telling was what was missing: taubah, or repentance, traditionally regarded as the essential first step of the Sufi path, appeared in only 4.8 percent of the content, while faqr, the ascetic embrace of poverty, was entirely absent. TikTok audiences, the data suggest, are drawn to advanced contemplative themes and skip the foundational, renunciatory stages that classical pedagogy treats as prerequisites.

The effects on viewers were measurable in their own words. Among the 250 analysed comments, 46 percent described increased self-awareness and moral self-improvement, with viewers reporting efforts to manage anger, cultivate patience and seek forgiveness, patterns the researchers link to the classical stage of taubah. Another 16 percent described an uplift in faith, with several commenters saying the algorithm had surfaced Sufi content unexpectedly and that they read the encounter as a divine reminder rather than a deliberate search. A further 26 percent of comments described sharia-oriented changes, including adopting modest dress and prioritising simplicity and health over the pursuit of wealth. The researchers treated these disclosures with unusual ethical care: because religious self-disclosure constitutes sensitive personal data under GDPR-style frameworks, all commenter quotations were rephrased into non-searchable indirect speech and decoupled from the accounts and videos that could identify them, while the ten public-facing creator accounts were cited openly in line with internet research ethics guidelines.

The findings also document a structural shift in how religious authority operates. Traditionally, a salik, or seeker, would study under a murshid, a spiritual mentor within a tariqa, or Sufi order, receiving instruction through direct, closed-door transmission. Knowledge such as ma’rifah was once considered a secret science taught privately in zawiyah, the Sufi lodges. TikTok has effectively democratised this hierarchy: anyone with an internet connection can now access a wide range of Sufi wisdom, and the study argues that religious authority on the platform is increasingly negotiated through visibility, relatability and audience interaction rather than anchored solely in institutional lineage. This decentralisation carries risks the authors acknowledge candidly. Not all circulating content comes from authentic sources, misinterpretation and distortion of traditional teachings are genuine dangers, and self-directed online learning could leave followers with less structured knowledge than previous generations acquired under mentorship.

There is also a sociological dimension to the phenomenon. The researchers frame TikTok-mediated Sufism as a response to what scholars of religion call the spiritual void, the sense of emptiness and alienation that accompanies modern urban life. Contemporary Sufi centres in large cities have already opened their doors to people of all theological backgrounds, offering meditation instruction and cultural events, and the platform extends that inclusivity further, drawing viewers who identify simply as ordinary Muslims with no tariqa affiliation at all. Where seekers once retreated to caves and forests for contemplation, users now create private spiritual moments with earphones and a smartphone, immersing themselves in guided reflection within their own rooms. Sufism, the study concludes, has shifted from an exclusive esoteric practice toward a form of mental therapy and everyday guidance, functioning as an internal navigation system for people who are materially successful yet spiritually restless.

The authors caution that their netnographic design, limited to 50 videos from ten accounts on a single platform, cannot support statistical generalisation, and they recommend comparative studies across Instagram, YouTube and other services, mixed-methods work on user motivations, and critical examination of simplification and commodification in algorithm-driven religious spaces. But the core message stands: TikTok is not merely a pipe through which Sufi teachings flow. Its algorithmic circulation, short-form format and multimodal features actively reshape how those teachings are produced, experienced and legitimised, making the platform a constitutive environment for religious meaning in the digital age. A tradition that once guarded its deepest knowledge behind closed doors has learned to speak in fifteen-second bursts, and millions are listening.

Subject of Research: The mediation and digital spread of Sufi values through TikTok short-form video content

Article Title: Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism

Article References: Wajdi, F., Fatimah, A. N., Effendi, M. R., & Amaliyah (2026). Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Keywords: Sufism, TikTok, digital religion, netnography, social media, Islamic spirituality, religious authority, short-form video, thematic analysis, maqamat and ahwal, ethical Sufism, philosophical Sufism

The timing of the research could hardly have been more charged. In October 2025, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that AI had entered WWE’s creative process, and months later TKO Group Holdings President Mark Shapiro acknowledged that Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, uses AI in storylines. WWE clarified that its current AI use is largely confined to video edits, highlight packages and audio noise reduction, but for fans who had spent years reading between the lines of every backstage leak, the distinction felt almost irrelevant. The genie, as the researchers put it, was already out of the bottle.

Professional wrestling occupies a unique position in this debate because it is arguably the most liminal genre in popular culture, neither pure sport nor pure theatre but a hybrid resting on a fragile contract known as kayfabe. Kayfabe is the sustained illusion that rivalries and victories are real, even when everyone knows they are scripted. It is not about deception but about collective buy-in. The study asks what happens when the presumed writer is no longer human but an algorithm trained on decades of television transcripts, and whether AI in effect turns heel by breaking wrestling’s oldest covenant.

Using netnography, a form of ethnographic research adapted for online communities, the authors analysed public discourse across three subreddits, r/SquaredCircle, r/WWE and the satirical r/SCJerk, over a ten-week period between November 2025 and May 2026. They gathered live event threads, conducted keyword searches for terms such as AI and ChatGPT, and applied snowball sampling until every identified topic reached saturation. Reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase procedure produced three dominant themes, each revealing a different strategy by which fans negotiate algorithmic authorship.

The first theme the researchers call the forensic gaze, a heightened form of textual and visual inspection in which fans evaluate content not by whether it advances a storyline but by whether a human created it at all. The phenomenon crystallised around the April 2026 NXT video package featuring Zaria, which fans overwhelmingly condemned for its AI-generated appearance, citing asynchronous mouth movement, missing background blur and a plastic sheen on skin textures. More than 150 separate comment threads debated the package, with side-by-side comparisons to older, human-made WWE videos serving both as evidence and as demonstrations of community authority. The gaze extended to language itself, with fans claiming they could identify machine-written promos by their symmetric sentences, absence of colloquialisms and lack of heat behind the words.

Yet the forensic gaze also uncovered an uncomfortable truth. A minority of fans confessed that formulaic human writing had become so predictable that they could not reliably distinguish it from machine output. As one commenter asked, would AI really be worse than the fifteenth identical cookie-cutter promo of the year? This liminal case, the authors argue, suggests that algorithmic kayfabe can taint the viewing experience retrospectively, raising the possibility that humans have already been performing something close to algorithmic work long before machines arrived to formalise it.

The second theme centres on affective rejection, condensed in the label fans gave to unwanted AI content: AI slop. The term carries theoretical weight beyond its insult value, connoting waste, matter out of place and something generated without intent, care or craft rather than created. Outrage spiked after the NXT video packages, and 62 mentions of AI slop appeared on r/SquaredCircle compared with 34 on r/WWE and only 12, mostly sarcastic, on r/SCJerk. The researchers connect this fury to the moral economy of creative labour, noting comments such as the observation that WWE will pay Roman Reigns twenty million dollars but will not pay a video editor sixty thousand. Fans, the study finds, have become political economists of culture, framing AI authorship not merely as poor output but as dispossession.

Beneath the anger lies what the authors identify as an ontological violation. Fans distinguished carefully between the first fake, the deliberate theatrical artifice of kayfabe in which they knowingly participate, and a second fake, an algorithmic simulation of that artistry with no human intention behind it. One fan summarised it bluntly: the problem is not that wrestling is fake, which is obvious, but that when AI writes it, there is no human performance behind it at all. Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis, the researchers describe this as a keying of a keying, a simulation of a simulation that audiences cannot trace and therefore cannot re-enter, rupturing the ritual contract between performer and spectator.

The third and most theoretically generative theme is parodic absorption, exemplified by r/SCJerk, where fans neither detect nor rage but instead swallow the AI threat whole through elaborate comedy. Users crafted a fictional AI-written return storyline for Bobby Lashley obsessed with Japanese culture, an absurd promo that mocked the real AI’s ignorance of wrestling continuity while exceeding its failures with deliberate ridiculousness. By producing funnier AI promos than the machines themselves, fans affirmed their own creative agency, and the community’s memes, such as the phrase AI is the new authority, allowed members to engage with the technology through strategic ambiguity, never committing to acceptance or rejection. The researchers call this an anti-affordance, a community-enforced discursive constraint that channels suspicion into irony, and they describe humour here as grassroots ontological repair, a communal mechanism for managing anxiety about a future no individual fan can control.

The study’s culminating contribution is the concept of dialectical algorithmic kayfabe. Rather than a single rupture in wrestling’s ritual contract, the authors argue that algorithmic kayfabe unfolds as an ongoing oscillation between detection, outrage and ironic repair, moments that coexist across platforms and can even be experienced by the same fan in the same evening. The framework extends affordance theory by showing that platform norms shape not just how fans speak but which emotions are legally acceptable in each space, and it advances Foucault’s author function by revealing its forensic side, in which fans deny authorship to any text lacking traces of human labour. As the researchers conclude, machines may increasingly help produce wrestling’s stories, but they hold no jurisdiction over togetherness, the collective performance of fandom that remains stubbornly, defiantly human.

Subject of Research: How WWE fans on Reddit perceive and negotiate AI-generated or AI-assisted wrestling storytelling on streaming platforms

Article Title: A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms

Article References: Pandey, S., & Roy, A. (2026). A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Keywords: WWE, artificial intelligence, netnography, fandom, streaming platforms, kayfabe, authenticity, Reddit, AI slop, algorithmic kayfabe, creative labour, digital culture