When adults on TikTok mocked teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, there was a flood of comments with just one phrase, sparking one of the year’s biggest memes: “ok boomer.” US Democratic presidential candidates are on TikTok. Another teen used the app to organize a strike in solidarity with her school district’s teachers. In November, a New Jersey teen posted a viral TikTok discussing the Chinese mass internment of Muslims (and was subsequently locked out of her account). When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was revealed to have worn brownface, TikTok had fun brutally roasting him. During 2019’s widespread climate strikes, TikTokers used jokes about e-girls to spread awareness about e-missions.
TikTok was never supposed to be political, but of course it was always going to be. Its slogan is “Make your day,” presumably by distracting you from *gestures widely at everything*. Political advertisements are not allowed, and until recently, TikTok had vague content guidelines that reportedly encouraged moderators to censor content sensitive to local governments. The app was expressly designed to discourage news-sharing - its home feed is non-chronological, and there are no visible timestamps for when a video is posted, making it nearly impossible to understand what happened when. TikTok was never supposed to be political. It’s a power that’s being used for better or for worse, and largely by minors. Though it’s always tried to position itself as a joyful space for creating and viewing silly and inspiring content, TikTok has unintentionally become one of the best means of disseminating ideas on the internet. TikTok videos on geopolitical events, from the Australian fires to the vague threat of World War III, can be viewed variously as awareness-spreading of underreported stories, coping mechanisms, exercises in nihilism, or goofy videos that no one should spend too much time analyzing. That the app is populated largely by teens also means that so much of what happens on it participates in a brand of ironic internet comedy that complicates the idea of serious news-sharing. It takes the best of Twitter (brevity, as videos can be a maximum of 60 seconds but most are much shorter) and YouTube (the ability to see someone’s face as they’re speaking to you) and adds the ability to go viral with virtually zero followers. TikTok has, in its barely year and a half of existing, become the most effective way for a random person to spread a message to the widest possible audience in the shortest amount of time. “It’s both parts a coping mechanism and an incredible way to speak our minds where we’re all equal, and I genuinely don’t think there’s any other platform that you can do that in a similar way.” “I love that through the use of short comedy sketches, teens are getting a bigger point across than most lengthy, informative articles posted by some old bloke who we can’t relate to in the slightest,” she explains. It was equal parts funny and incisive, and ended up being viewed nearly 300,000 times. Chloé Hayden, a 22-year-old motivational speaker and YouTuber based in Victoria, had barely used the video-sharing app, but her peers were flooding it with their frustration with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s mishandling of the crisis and footage of the dense smoke as a way of raising awareness among a largely ignorant public.Ĭhloé’s video was a perfect encapsulation of the TikTok sensibility: She used a popular meme format to show the hypocrisy of the lack of media attention by comparing it to the immediate outpouring of financial support after the Notre Dame fire. As 24 million acres of Australia burned in record bushfires between September and January, Australian teens turned to TikTok.