TikTok: from silly dances to pranking Trump

This global pandemic has surged the expansion of a new social media platform. TikTok. Across the country, Brits forced into lockdown and stuck inside their bedroom, have balanced their phone against anything lying around and pressed record. TikTok was founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and has now been downloaded more than 2bn times globally. According to mobile industry analysts Sensor Tower, one in three Brits have TikTok installed on their devices. The week before Johnson announced the lockdown, 278,000 UK users downloaded TikTok on their phones, up 6% from the week previously. For the week 23rd of March, when lockdown was enforced, UK installations surged by 34%. Lockdown has supercharged the use of TikTok. It is a cure to the boredom, there is always a new challenge to attempt or dance routine to learn.

Yet, the landscape is changing. Content has spread more quickly on TikTok. The platform has been expanded from an environment of dance routines to a forum for political expression. The #Savage challenge and the #Renegade challenge have been transformed into dances and lipsyncs set to political speeches and challenges used to make political points. Hashtags such as BackBoris and BooForBoris have gained popularity. The intersection between politics and this fandom culture has recently emerged and TikTok has provided the perfect outlet. TikTok has made it easier to find similar 'members' of the political fandoms through using the same song, audio clip, filter, dance or challenge. 

Not only has TikTok intertwined internet culture and politics but it has provided a new outlet for political protest. The idea of social media as a platform for political discourse is not a new idea. If we look at history, we can see the tradition of media platforms evolving beyond their founders' initial designs such as Twitter's role in the Arab Springs protests in 2011 and MTV cable TV network's role galvanizing young voters in the early 1990's. With the Arab Springs, protesters used social media to organise demonstrations, disseminate information about their activities and raise local and global awareness. This was in the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution, with young Egyptians spreading the call to protest online with the help of a Facebook campaign, "We Are All Khaled Said", organised by the April 6 Youth Movement. Social media was influential in the Arab Springs by helping activists gain the power to overthrow powerful dictatorship, become aware of the underground communities that exist in their own fight and listen to others stories. There is no denying that technology has proved significant in movements around the world. 

But the content of TikTok is being share more quickly than other platforms. It is not only promoting movements but giving practical advice for those participating. For example, an influencer called Hyran who normally tells his millions of followers how to take care of their skin is now giving his tips on tear gas and how teens should deal with a situation in the likelihood that they will be fired against during a protest. If you are tear-gassed, he mentions that you should use chilled milk to relieve the pain, then a mix of soapy water. He states, "do not rub, touch any part of your face", just as if he was giving his usual skincare advice. There are now posts that inform teenages to put their mobile phones into airplane mode if they go near a demonstration to avoid being tracked.The platform is being changed drastically. It has gone away from the idea of it being junk food for the brain - a consortium of silly dances, gossip and consumerism. It is now towards a series of tips and tricks to survive the present government. 

The convergence of internet culture and politics reached its peak at the weekend in the culmination of empty seats at Donald Trump's campaign rally. The US president was angry on Saturday when his first rally in three months backfired with poor attendance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Republican heartland. Why did this happen? Internet culture of course. K-pop and TikTok fans mustered their forces to humiliate Donald Trump. A large number of users had registered for tickets to the rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign team tweeted asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally. This trend spread throughout TikTok where videos with millions of views informed viewers to do the same. On Saturday night, Twitter users were quick to declare the victory of their own campaign. The Republican Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted, "Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok", in response to Parscale, who had tweeted that "radical protesters" had "interfered" with attendance. Thousands of other users posted tweets claiming their victory and racking up millions of views. 

TikTok has made politics even more closer to Gen Z. Those teenagers who are not old enough to vote but believe they can impact their country in the political system. These no-show protests through TikTok are so powerful that they can cause the humiliation of a US president. The intersection between internet culture, facilitated through TikTok, and politics is increasing. The internet culture of K-pop fans have reclaimed the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag by spamming it with endless K-pop videos in hopes to make it harder to white supremacists and sympathisers to find one another and communicate their messages. Even in June, when the Dallas Police Department asked citizens to submit videos of suspicious or illegal activity through a dedicated app, K-pop Twitter claimed credit for crashing the app by uploading thousands of 'fancam' videos. 

TikTok is therefore changing politics, more than Twitter or Facebook. It is merging niches of internet cultures like K-pop fans and creating new internet cultures. TikTok has given rise to fancams (video compilations of an individual) dedicated to Labour leader Keir Starmer to a Michael Gove cosplayer. These internet cultures are emerging in pockets across the platform and are changing politics. TikTok has criss-crossed fandoms and politics to another level and this cannot be underestimated as we seen at the weekend in pranking the President of the USA.