If TikTok Teens Won’t Save Us, Who Will?

The majority of users on TikTok are below the age of 20. With the pandemic happening during an election year, young people have had a lot of time to educate themselves about the substantial problems in our world. While adults argue that young people aren’t the superheroes we need, they sure are doing a lot of the work on and off social media.

Lia is an 18-year-old Indigenous college student who uses her TikTok to advocate for Indigenous issues. Her first video was uploaded in July 2020, and she has already accumulated over 55,000 followers, as well as over one million likes as of October 2020. In her videos, Lia uses a mix of dry humor and popular music; she also talks directly to the camera about certain issues. Her most viewed TikTok has 1.2 million views in which Lia sits in front of the camera and states facts about Native Americans by using rhetorical questions. “Did you know that Native American women make up more than 40% of all women in prison? … Okay, well surely you knew that we’re the poorest minority in the country.”

TikTok human machine recognition page.

While Lia has other social media platforms, she decided to use TikTok purely for activism because it reaches a wider and more diverse audience than traditional media, has little to no government regulation, and gets a message out quickly.

“Because of things like the For You page, the algorithm puts videos on your account that it thinks you’ll be interested in,” she explained. “[I can reach a wide audience] not because they know me, but because I came up on their For You page and they were interested in what I have to say. Once you see a couple of Native TikTokers you get put on Native TikTok.”

Similar to other platforms like YouTube and Instagram, the algorithm recommends videos based on the ones you engage with.This is how activism spreads easily on the app. Lia is not the only one using her platform to speak on important issues. @grace_africa gained over 25.6 million likes and over 700,000 followers with her comedic skits and impressions, but with the recent protests in Nigeria calling to end SARS, she has made several videos about the issue which have over 50,000 views and was featured in a segment on The Daily Show. It doesn’t stop there; the hashtag “blm” alone has over 18 billion videos. 

Youth activism has a long history, but now it seems like more young people are becoming activists through social media. With lockdowns brought on by COVID-19, people not only had more time to dedicate to social causes, but slowed down to really notice the injustices happening.

“It has become a trend,” Lia said. “Everyone has been talking about Black Lives Matter or Indigenous peoples or people at the border because it’s in style [to talk about these things]. I just hope it stays in style.”

On Instagram, whole pages have been dedicated to activism like @shityoushouldcareaobut, @earthrisestudio, and @soyouwanttotalkabout which break down issues like #EndSARS, pronouns, and Roe v. Wade in 10 swipeable slides or less.

Posts calling for followers to stay on top of social issues are becoming increasingly popular. While this is good news for social justice, the older generations write things like “Claudia Conway’s TikToks Can’t Save Democracy.” But if not them, then who?

“A comment that I get a lot is, ‘You’re too young to be this angry,’” Lia stated. “It says a lot about how our world looks if people like me feel the need to dedicate a lot of their time to activism because older generations aren’t doing so. It’s up to the people with more experience, with more power in the government [to change the world]. Unfortunately, all who are educating the masses are people my age.”

Of course there are exceptions, but young people feel the need to fight for issues that aren’t being solved. When asked if Lia would go into politics, she admitted she wouldn’t “because of how corrupt it is.” So while we look to the government for change, it seems like young people are doing a lot of the work fighting for social justice. They aren’t going to solve the world’s problems on their own and while they’re not experts with Ph.D.'s, we could still learn a lot from them regarding possible solutions to the injustices occurring throughout the country.