TikTok and memetic activism against racism in South Africa

This article explores TikTok users' responses to a racist incident at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. We analyse the content strategies of TikToks that received the most engagement as well as a timeline of TikToks to analyse how the framing of the event shifted over time. We consider TikTok as a space for youth to reflect on everyday politics in highly personalized ways and to develop their voice and visibility through particular content strategies. We firstly argue that South African youth frame local political acts within global frameworks to link their own political realities to algorithmically recognized global causes. In addressing both local audiences and the algorithm, activists construct messages with potentially broader algorithmic visibility that speak both to their highly localized context and to a global generation Z audience. We caution that such global framings of local political events may limit engagement with local complexities. Secondly, we argue that similar to TikTok activism globally, we observe the 'memefication' or 'templatibility' of activist messages on TikTok, where users juxtapose a political message with an audio meme or 'earworm'. By doing this, South African users mobilize increased visibility and insert these intertextual political messages within existing 'imitation publics' that algorithmically congregate around such global memes, infusing new meaning into the affective language of global youth culture, while injecting playfulness into local political culture. We therefore argue that TikTok's power is essentially glocal, as it allows local issues to be reframed through global discourses and memes.