To: Full Universe

From: Dianne Graft for Congress

Subject: What We Can Do Today 

Hello everyone,

This week our country is in mourning. As we battle for answers and justice for George Floyd, Christian Cooper, Tony Mcdade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless more black Americans murdered by police offers, I am looking for ways to use my privilege to help black Americans fight for their rights and liberation. As a white American, I’m sure I’m not alone in this search.

I reach out to you tonight to not only offer my condolences and prayers, but to point to Black leaders in our community who can help us do some good in these challenging days. My staff and I have put together a list of recommendations by black leaders like Ericka Hart, L. Joy Williams and Deray Mckesson.

We must do all that we can to support our fellow Americans in this fight against violent hate and brutal injustice. We must remember that all of our greatest victories have occurred when we’ve fought for one another and stood up for one another and supported the voices of our most oppressed. We must look to tomorrow and ask the hard questions.

God bless you and your families,

Dianne Graft 

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(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 it’s capital “Q” 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 “For You” page,  it’s biggest consistencies are cute animals and lesbians. Lesbians was a surprising one for me, not because I didn’t 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 it’s not that there’s *more* lesbians on TikTok, it’s that their unique algorithm is very determined to throw them all at me at once. I’ve never been so appreciative of a social media algorithm.  

‘TikTok Lesbians” have a language a culture all their own. They have their own set of memes, their own remixes on those memes, their own discourse. “I 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, I’ll be staying, thank you.” Was the viral audio about Lesbian’s that I encountered first. It flared a question in my mind: why was TikTok a place where Lesbian’s 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 they’re 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. It’s worth mentioning that right along with the Lesbian movement on TikTok, there’s 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 “friend” or “follow” someone, waiting to be accepted and wondering if they’ll 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 don’t want to. You can save their video (if the user allows) and keep it with you for times when you’re offline and need a boost. You can even “stitch” their audio over your own video as a form of collaboration or tribute. Best of all, you don’t have to sift through and entire website. The more you “love” videos tagged with words like lgbt, gay, lesbian, queer, etc, the more TikTok learns to give you more of that content.

There’s 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 he’s 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 they’re 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.