TikTok: The future of Changemaking?
Can social change be achieved in 60 seconds?
Created in 2017 and made accessible worldwide in 2018, the social media platform ‘TikTok’ continues to be owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and allows content creators to create short-form visual content covering various topics. The top categories of content made in 2020–2021 were ‘funny videos’ (48%) , ‘personal updates’ (47%), ‘memes’ (39%) and ‘coronavirus news’ (28%) (GlobalWebIndex, 2021 in BusinessOfApps, 2021).
In this age where 66.6% of the global population has a mobile phone (Smart Insights, 2021), very few will have never heard ‘TikTok’. With 689 million active monthly users a month, a high engagement rate within younger generations (62% of users are within the 10–19 and 20–29 age ranges) and a significantly smaller gender difference of usage compared to other platforms, Tik Tok has become a key communicator of sociocultural norms of the modern times.
TikTok usage has increased in the UK during COVID lockdown, including campaigners sharing their experiences either alongside, or instead of, attending protests and other forms of social activism. Lujain et al. (2020) found that during the 2019 Lebanese protests and the 2020 Beirut explosion, TikTok activists frequently used political and socio-economical directed content in humorous and satirical…
