Abstract

This essay explores TikTok’s role in driving social change through influencers, comparing their effectiveness to accredited experts. TikTok’s rise has promoted activism, empowering millions to engage in global issues. Influencers, with their authenticity and reliability, create significant impact and surpass traditional experts in audience reach and engagement. From women’s rights to #BlackLivesMatter, TikTok campaigns have sparked global conversations and mobilised support. Despite its entertainment reputation, TikTok has become a powerful tool for education and activism, with influencers at its forefront. This essay highlights TikTok’s impact in bridging online activism with real-world change.  

 

Introduction

TikTok presents a fresh approach to instigating social change, often in many regards proving to be more impactful than change initiated by accredited experts. The forum not only amplifies voices, but also creates a platform for individuals from diverse backgrounds to drive meaningful change.

Social Media plays an integral part in today’s society. From entertainment to education, it has revolutionised the way we interact, communicate and stay informed. Over several decades social media has become a well-known concept around the world as people allow it to incorporate into our everyday lives. TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to create short videos using music, videos and filters and to share these videos to over 800 million active users (Cervi, 2021). While everyday users on this platform work to relay information between themselves, social media influencers are the most prominent and effective individuals on TikTok. They present themselves as approachable, authentic, and friendly (Tafesse & Wood, 2021), and therefore gain a dedicated following, reaching millions of people around the world. This essay will focus on how effective influencers on this platform have been in creating change and generating movement compared to change made by qualified and experienced professionals. By focusing on events such as women’s rights and Black Lives Matter, we examine how the capabilities of visibility, edibility and association support the creation of social movement on TikTok (Hautea et al., 2021).

 

Social Media and Activism

The rise of TikTok has led to a number of opportunities for collective action (Hautea et al., 2021). Boulianne, Lalancette and Ilkiw (2020) state that social media has the opportunity and potential to address many deficiencies in institutional procedures which currently fail to involve citizens in global policy decisions, thereby serving as a platform for questioning, contesting or validating activism-related initiatives. By allowing so many individuals to communicate across such a broad platform, TikTok and other social media platforms work to close this gap and open the opportunity for citizens to create powerful change.

TikTok was the world’s second-most downloaded app in 2019, with its popularity increasing rapidly (Serrano et al., 2020). With such a high number of active users, it comes as no surprise as to why it has proven to be so effective in promoting social change and activism. It has also been found that topics such as political communication has a much higher rate of engagement on TikTok in comparison to other social media platforms, due to integrating various information channels to distribute their messages. (Serrano et al., 2020). Given the expansive creative platform on TikTok, users have complete creative freedom to produce and share their videos according to their own vision, therefore making it significantly easier for them not only to get their message across, but also for them to reach their intended viewers.

TikTok also employs artificial intelligence to assess users’ interests and preferences by analysing their interactions with the content, including which videos they like and comment on, which users and influencers’ content they prefer, and how long they view a video to therefore create a personalised feed for every user (Cervi, 2021). Through using these algorithms, TikTok can effectively share their content with viewers who are most likely to interact and follow it, which also helps to keep users interested and encourages them to keep using the platform. Therefore, these platforms are not only affective in sharing crucial information surrounding activism, but they also work to convey this information to users who would benefit from it, ensuring its relevance and effective utilisation, thus enhancing efficiency compared to alternative methods of communicating and transferring information such as websites, news articles or even other social media platforms.

Digital activism across social media embodies a new approach used for cultivating an online community, forging connections with other users and spreading messages across borders. Even though a significant portion of society does not have access to the online realm, activism on social media can offer a space to amplify marginalised voices, facilitating opportunities for cross-border dialogue (Sarrats, 2022). 

 

Influencers on TikTok in comparison to accredited experts.  

The rise of influencers on TikTok has created many changes in the way information is shared and communicated, from advertisements to campaigns. Social media influencers are “prominent social media users who accumulated a dedicated following by crafting an authentic online persona” (Tafesse & Wood, 2021, para. 2). They can gain millions of followers and therefore become highly visible on social media due to their large status, continuously being very active on their social platforms and constantly engaging with their followers (Sanders, 2024).

Consequently, social media influencers can be considered as the primary opinion leaders who are capable of reaching millions of people worldwide; people who view them as both celebrities and experts in their given fields, thus encouraging these people to take action or continue to do further research (Croes, 2021). Croes (2021) also states that people identify more strongly with social media influencers than other endorsers, due to influencers presenting themselves as ‘ordinary’ people online and therefore appearing approachable, authentic, and friendly. This forges deeper psychological bonds with their followers due to them sharing highly personal content revolving around their lifestyle and interests (Tafesse & Wood, 2021). Society is generally positively influenced by these individuals due to their admiration and trust in social media influencers.

We can then compare this to experts and educators who, in many different ways, do not have the opportunity to reach such large numbers of individuals and cannot share and spread their information as effectively. As opposed to social media influencers, these experts have no way of filtering their audience to therefore reach a specific group of people and thus cannot optimize the impact of their efforts. They also cannot put out media that can reach such large numbers in a short amount of time due to a lack of resources and challenges in gaining interest towards their platforms, and have not had the opportunity to create such a strong relationship with their audience to therefore create trust and relatability as influencers have. All of these factors and more contribute to preventing experts from creating such a significant change.

 

TikTok on Current Issues

Despite often being used for entertainment purposes, participants of TikTok will find many educational sources while scrolling through the platform. Pena-Fernandez et al. (2023) claims social media has the power to create open collaborative and participatory spaces to therefore allow young individuals to engage and empower themselves in political and social activism surrounding relevant and important topics. When searching for topics related to women’s rights on the platform, users are instantly presented with an extensive array of content. Within seconds they will encounter thousands of videos containing speeches, discussions, factual information, opinions, movements and many other materials addressing various aspects of women’s rights issues. They can watch well-known faces, including popular influencers, positively discuss these matters in an interesting and attention-catching format. This differs from other methods of retaining information such as google or news articles which can result in saturation, or information overload (Bawden & Robinson, 2020). The #MeToo (2017) campaign found a place on TikTok in following years, and took the world by storm gathering female voices from around the globe. This campaign became an intersectional feminist online movement by calling women not only to join and support each other while creating a community across countries, but also to share their testimonies of harassment and sexual assault (Sarrats, 2022). Sarrats (2022) also mentions the many other movements created on social media platforms such as TikTok including #FreeHerFace and #Abolish522 which work as a constant reminder that girls and women in countries such as Afghanistan have no rights, spreading this information to countries and communities who otherwise would have never become aware of these ongoing issues, gaining significantly more awareness. These movements, along with others, can gain traction and spread through audiences when leveraged by influencers with millions of followers, thereby generating substantially greater awareness. TikTok also created a vast movement for the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. The message of the Black Lives Matter movement essentially states that Black lives are too worth grieving, in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise (Liebermann, 2020). The movement is one of many that was ‘born digital’ on social media outlets before spreading to the streets, whereby minority groups whose suffering lacks public visibility has a much higher chance of being seen and a greater rate of creating change. (Liebermann, 2020). Since the movement began in 2013 after the unarmed shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the hashtag was used over 30 million times in the following 4 years on twitter alone, with hundreds of millions of uses in following years as alternate social media platforms grew, including well-known influencers across TikTok, reaching an immense audience (Liebermann, 2020). It is therefore undeniable how effective TikTok as a platform as well as its users and specifically its influencers have become in initiating and implementing change. From spreading awareness around the globe to providing a platform for marginalised voices to be heard, this platform has already made a profound impact on thousands of individuals by initiating necessary changes.

 

Conclusion

Social media platforms like TikTok, along with the influencers who populate them, play a crucial role in modern society. They serve as important channels for communication, spreading information, entertainment, and shaping societal norms and behaviours in profound ways. With over 20% of the world’s population on TikTok, it comes as no surprise how impactful and influential the platform and users of the platform have become in making change around the world. Many individuals use TikTok extensively due to these platforms being highly immersive, designed to capture the attention of users for extended periods (Montag et al. 2021). This consequently causes a significant number of individuals to follow influencers on TikTok due to their perceived relatability and the sense of connection they convey, leading viewers to regard these influencers as their friends (Croes, 2021). As a result, TikTok and its users have become the foundation for numerous impactful changes, gaining momentum, increasing followers, and extending their influence into the real world. From campaigns surrounding women’s rights and the #MeToo movement to #BlackLivesMatter and the impact influencers had in spreading this knowledge and gaining the much-needed support from all around the world.

Due to the endorsement and advocacy for initiating and maintaining changes within contemporary media, the utilisation of influencers on TikTok to raise awareness has unlocked avenues for growth via social media. Viewers witnessing influencers endorse specific campaigns are significantly more inclined to follow and support these initiatives, therefore actively contributing to creating change (Croes, 2021), particularly in comparison to acquiring similar information from articles or websites written by industry experts. Even though said experts can often be more reliable sources of information, the genuine relatability and connection conveyed by influencers is enough to created heightened engagement and involvement among their audiences, and initiate much needed change.

 

References 

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