But the way political education is attempted over platforms like TikTok and Instagram has created thousands if not millions of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning teenagers with extremely incoherent ideologies. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with trying to teach people things over social media. But to teenagers encountering these ideas for the first time through a series of disconnected posts, it’s not immediately obvious, and the format of the information actively discourages making the connection. To researchers of the American security state, the relationship between the military-industrial complex and American policing is obvious: the two are one and the same. Each post is insular, and there’s no way to ensure you’ll stay on the same topic for more than a few seconds - one minute you’re reading about the war in Yemen, but scroll down and someone is telling you what could be gained by defunding the police. The consequence of the short-form lesson is that people learn about issues one at a time instead of having their worldviews disrupted as a whole. As soon as you condense a topic or talking point down far enough that it can be dispatched via TikTok or Instagram, there’s almost nothing left to say.
The rest of the information - all those facts that situate instances of police violence within the greater context of the United States’s carceral history - will be put off to another video or forgotten altogether. That’s way too much to fit into one TikTok, so they cut it down to the basics: Black people are being injured and killed by the police, and we should do something about it. They’ve probably read a little bit about it, and they have lots of information they could share, including but not limited to the origins of policing in slave patrols and strike-breakers, the mass criminalization of drug users, the expansion of the surveillance state and the statistics on which demographic groups are most likely to come into regular contact with police. Let’s stick with the example of police violence, which a hypothetical content creator wants to discuss with their followers. You can’t, but that hasn’t stopped millennial Instagram influencers and teenage political propagandists from trying. But things get more complicated when creators begin producing content about broad themes - how can you fit everything someone could possibly need to know about police violence into an infographic? Sometimes that’s okay after all, if you’re trying to raise awareness about a specific fundraiser or a piece of legislation, sometimes 60 seconds and three Instagram slides are all you need. Because both TikTok and Instagram are visually dominant and cater to short-form content - TikToks are a maximum of 60 seconds long, and Instagram stories are only 15 - users are discouraged from saying more than absolutely necessary in any explanation. Explicit political analyses, which used to be confined to books, documentaries and the occasional longform article, have now made their way to social media. It’s always been possible to learn about current events quickly via newspapers and magazines, but most news carries only an implicit political message, regardless of journalists’ motives. At first glance, it seems stupid but harmless.īut Instagram and TikTok are fundamentally changing the way young people take in and process important information. On Instagram, this takes the form of a constant barrage of pastel-colored, sans-serif font infographics, and on TikTok, a corner of the app where teenagers angrily duet each other’s videos trying to prove that they’re right, and the other 16-year-old with LED lights in his bedroom is wrong. I wish I could tell you that the TikTok and Instagram experiences are different from one another, but I find myself increasingly subject to the same content on both platforms: vague, bite-size, attempts at political education, the topics of which range from ecosocialism to minimum wage to Palestine. I am at least five years older than the average TikTok user, and when I eventually lose interest in watching various high school students dancing and sharing unsolicited opinions, I switch over to Instagram, to be among the other 20-somethings ignoring the housework that needs to be done and the emails that need to be answered. Occasionally, in between completing very grown-up tasks like paying medical bills, washing the dishes and organizing my tax documents, I take a break from the real world and look at TikTok.
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