Iman Ghasempour
Master's candidate in Media, Democracy, and Human Rights
I study how media affects human rights and democratic institutions.
Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. Before that, Kansas City: a communication degree, a marketing job, and a semester registering voters.
About
I'm doing an MA in Media, Democracy, and Human Rights at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. Most of my research so far has been about TikTok: how its recommendation system decides what gets seen, why that tends to reward the worst content, and why the rules written to fix it (including the EU's Digital Services Act) keep aiming at posts instead of the system that ranks them.
I also write an occasional newsletter about the move from Kansas City to Kalmar, KC to Kalmar, and have spent more than ten years in Photoshop. Some of that work is on the About page.
More about meCurrently reading
- Everything Is Tuberculosis John Green
- Invisible Women Caroline Criado Perez
- A Nearly Normal Family M.T. Edvardsson
Selected Work
All projects
MA paper, Spring 2026
Amplified by Design: TikTok's Engagement Logic, Misogynistic Content, and the Limits of Platform Governance
April 2026, Linnaeus University, Global Challenges in New Media and Management
TikTok's recommendation system rewards misogynistic content because outrage counts as engagement. This paper argues the problem is the design, and that self-regulation, advertiser standards, and the Digital Services Act all miss it by going after posts instead.
