TikTok is a Bastion for Quarantined Lesbians, and Theyâre Persuadable.
(This piece is currently in revision)
About two months ago (right around when Quarantine became real to me), I joined TikTok. I had waited so long out of the same confusion that I scoffed at when it prevented older creators I love from joining Snapchat. I was officially an old lady yelling at clouds at 25, but Quarantine with itâs capital âQâ pushed me over the edge.
It took less than 24 hours for TikTok to learn me, and less than one hour for me to be addicted. Now, two months later, if you look at my âFor Youâ page, Â itâs biggest consistencies are cute animals and lesbians. Lesbians was a surprising one for me, not because I didnât know where TikTok got that impression of me from (lol), but because even as a young queer woman, I had yet to find a social media space with such a concentration of them in one place. The logician in me says itâs not that thereâs *more* lesbians on TikTok, itâs that their unique algorithm is very determined to throw them all at me at once. Iâve never been so appreciative of a social media algorithm. Â
âTikTok Lesbiansâ have a language a culture all their own. They have their own set of memes, their own remixes on those memes, their own discourse. âI just want to come on here as another 21+ person who joined TikTok a week ago thinking it was for children, but as a Lesbian, Iâll be staying, thank you.â Was the viral audio about Lesbianâs that I encountered first. It flared a question in my mind: why was TikTok a place where Lesbianâs wanted to stay? What about TikTok so appeals to queer women?
One answer may lay in that same urge to stay away that kept me off of TilkTok for so long. Your parents, bosses, co-workers and hostile strangers may follow you on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, but theyâre much less likely to be on TikTok, let alone be able to find you on the platform (unless they have a similar attraction to queer content), so TikTok offers a sort of safe haven for queer teenagers and adults alike to express who they are even in the face of people in their lives they may not feel safe coming out to yet. Itâs worth mentioning that right along with the Lesbian movement on TikTok, thereâs an entire queer quilt also living in their heyday.
Passive connection to a larger support network also helps TikTok feel more accessible for queer women. Instead of the social anxiety involved with deciding whether to âfriendâ or âfollowâ someone, waiting to be accepted and wondering if theyâll follow you back, TikTok puts all content on the platform in an easy, scroll-through home page.
You see content, some of it supportive and touching and empathetic, without ever having to directly interact with its creator if you donât want to. You can save their video (if the user allows) and keep it with you for times when youâre offline and need a boost. You can even âstitchâ their audio over your own video as a form of collaboration or tribute. Best of all, you donât have to sift through and entire website. The more you âloveâ videos tagged with words like lgbt, gay, lesbian, queer, etc, the more TikTok learns to give you more of that content.
Thereâs a vibrant community of queer women on TikTok, many of whom are American citizens and old enough to vote. A mentor of mine has said that TikTok is not yet a valuable place to spend resources to garner votes, and heâs not wrong. I think we can start laying crucial groundwork, though, and one of our starting demographics should be queer women.
Many of these women are already passionate about social justice causes and key progressive issues like equal pay, climate change, healthcare, immigration and wealth redistribution. Many of these women are content creators who began their careers pre-TikTok and have experience creating powerful, successful content in the digital space. Ads are not the path here and neither is making a candidate an account and trying to go viral. The key here is work with the existing members of the community to elevate issues and GOTV strategies that can resonate with their audience: the youngest and most persuadable of our voters (also, historically, the least likely to turn out).
TikTok can be best used as a GOTV and relational organizing tool, rather than a place for persuasion and issue ads disguised as cool collabs. Younger voters are especially attuned to when theyâre being pandered to, so rather than pushing for specific candidates or creating jingles, a broader focus on championing progressive values and the role of young people in shaping their own futures through politics is the key to using TikTok effectively.
Queer women, along with queer women of color, trans folx, trans of color and gender nonconforming folx dominate the progressive TikTok landscape and they are already primed to be activists. Getting in on the ground floor may be a valuable way to steer out young people into a more politically active and educated future.
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