Editor’s Note: This is a commentary. The opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
In recent years, social media has had a large impact on political activism in America, especially among teenagers and young adults. In the age of the Instagram infographic, apps like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok have been important tools for young activists. These apps allow political activists to spread their messages and to gain a following. But what happens when the politics and views turn hateful; how do these sites filter out bigotry? The answer: they usually don’t. Over the years, it has become more prevalent for political extremists like far-right militias and transgender-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) to influence young social media users.
Social media sites like TikTok have an obligation to filter out this content. The developers of these apps also need to consider the role the software they develop has in spreading bigoted ideology. For You Pages and Twitter feeds don’t only cater to your interests, they expand them. From TERFs to incels, bigotry gets fed to young users by social media algorithms.
According to a study done by Media Matters for America, an organization that describes itself as a web-based, not-for-profit “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” transphobia is one of the leading hateful ideologies being fed onto users’ TikTok For You Pages (FYPs).
When it comes to transphobic content online, these videos often fall into two categories — far-right extremism and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Generation Z is a highly political generation and there is plenty of feminist content to be found on apps like TikTok. Recently, as I have (admittedly shamefully) been spending more and more hours scrolling through my own FYP, the feminist content I have been fed has changed dramatically. I have seen an increasing number of videos promoting these transphobic ideologies.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminism is built on a doctrine of bio-essentialism. Bio-essentialism strips gender down to biological processes. These women are proudly against progressive gender movements. They believe that gender theory which depicts gender as a performance, a spectrum and/or a social construct is inherently “anti-woman.” They also happen to be spreading a great deal of harmful content through apps like TikTok and Twitter.
Famed gender theorist Judith Butler wrote in a 2021 op-ed for The Guardian, “Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends.” And trans-exclusionary radical feminism is just that — an anti-gender fascist trend. TERFs are not only angry social media users, but their views reflect a larger societal trend of transphobia. It has never been easy to be trans in the U.S., but as state governments are stripping trans individuals of their right to gender-affirming care, it has become increasingly difficult to exist as a trans person online and out in the world.
Lucky for me, I’m pretty secure in my own political beliefs and have had plenty of time to develop them. But every time I see one of these videos, whether it be a woman claiming that trans women are invading “female spaces” or another TERF calling openly trans female celebrities “men,” I can’t help but think of the much younger women seeing these videos.
As I’ve mentioned, Gen Z is quite political. Even young teens are starting to have the chance to become politically involved via social media; those same young teens are perhaps the most impressionable when they are exposed to extremist content. Say a young teenage girl decides she wants to learn more about feminism, what does she do? Maybe she decides to read feminist theory, or maybe — and possibly more likely — she decides to search for feminist content on social media sites like TikTok or Twitter. And so, this young woman finds herself on an insidious pipeline.
Through social media sites like TikTok, young women’s perceptions of feminism can rapidly go from progressive to problematic. TERFs don’t empower women, they feed into far-right ideology, which is the same ideology that leads to rising rates of suicide among transgender youth. And here we have apps like TikTok allowing fascist ideology to slip through its cracks.
You can’t stop a teenager from using social media, but the companies behind these apps can work to stop the spread of dangerous ideology. We as a society need to hold the creators of these apps accountable. Zhang Yiming, founder of the corporation “ByteDance,” the group behind TikTok is worth $39.1 billion. Elon Musk, who recently acquired X, formally known as Twitter, for $44 billion, has a net worth of $262.3 billion. Billionaires aren’t exactly known for having a great deal of care for the 99%. It’s time these tech giants face some pushback for the fascism that they are helping grow.
Rowan Keller Smith (they/them) is a sophomore writing and psychology double major. Contact them at [email protected].
