About TikTok
TikTok sex education has already been life-changing for users seeking validation through finding community and overcoming internalized shame and sexual stigma. As TikTok’s algorithm learns more about you it carves out your custom-tailored slice of the internet. “On TikTok, videos are uploaded to the platform in formats that are then ‘read’ by their artificial intelligence systems who, by using the information provided by the user, learn more about these content creators and their audiences by identifying textual and visual markers that may denote personally revealing demographics and feed this data into the platform’s recommendation systems” (Botoman, 2022). TikTok’s automated, AI-driven content moderation system provides an ever-changing influence over users' interactions with the platform. The algorithm’s ability to rapidly process information extracted from users’ posts makes human moderation mostly unnecessary. Nevertheless, TikTok does employ a team of human moderators for cases that go beyond the machine’s capacity and require a more nuanced review. The product of the work of the incomprehensibly fast algorithmic moderation and curation process is the “for you page” (#fyp). We see “the aftermath: videos that are flagged or amplified, and embedded ads that are tailored to our preferences based on our past interactions and content we’ve viewed (Botoman, 2022). The personalized “for you” page can make users of the app feel less alone by feeling surrounded by a digital community with a shared sense of humor, inside jokes, music tastes, hobbies, and curiosities. TikTok’s hyper-personalized system makes users feel seen in that their interests are recognized, but is being seen worth the close observation and endless web of online surveillance? For many young people, the answer is yes. The risk of handing oneself over to “TikTok’s elusive, all-seeing algorithm” (Dumais, 2021) is worth the potential reward of finding an online community that disrupts the isolation many have felt in the last few years. During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, much of gen z was physically isolated from their peers and were living at home. For many queer and trans kids, this separation from friends and life outside the home was at best uncomfortable and at worst dangerous or even deadly. SNS like TikTok has been a tool of survival and social sustenance for the past two years. “TikTok is predominantly a site of youth culture. The iconography, rituals, spaces, and lifestyles can be seen in TikTok trends” (Kennedy, 2020). TikTok’s popularity is explained by the site being the antidote or solution to boredom during the coronavirus pandemic. Though it is important to note that boredom is a problem or feeling experienced by the privileged. Front line workers and people fighting for their lives and the lives of their communities were not and are not bored during the pandemic. Many people did not have the privilege of having safe housing, financial stability, or hours of time to spend on content creation during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those with multiple marginalized identities and living in the global south experiencing vaccine apartheid. It is unsurprising that the TikTok platform, which is most frequently used by young people with privilege, primarily promotes content that features white, thin, able, and wealthy teenagers (Kennedy, 2020).
While TikTok is currently a hub of youth culture, TikTok is also a significant site for youth sex education, particularly sex education that centers on LGBTQ+ people’s experiences. A 2014 study in the US “suggests a significant difference by sexual orientation among youth in relying on online sources for sexual health information (78% of LGBTQ youth compared to 19% of heterosexual youth),” indicating the importance of inclusive sex education being accessible for teens online (Jenzel and Karl, 2015; Mitchell et al. 2014).
TikTok has been a powerful site of community building, identity formation, and a much-needed distraction from and means of processing the fear and isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. While there are many positives to TikTok, it is also a capitalist cesspool that actively reproduces oppressive power dynamics through censorship and upholds ideals of young white femininity often reproduced online. The first TikTok star to reach 50 million followers was Charli D’Amelio who was fifteen years old when she achieved that milestone. Now seventeen years old, D’Amelio has 138.2 million followers and 10.7 billion likes on her page (D’Amelio, n.d.). She is white and slim with long, straightened, brown hair and straight, white teeth. She often wears tight-fitting crop tops that showcase her small, traditionally feminine frame. She comes from a wealthy, conservative family, and tends to use their extravagant family home as the backdrop for her viral videos.
As a teenage girl celebrity, her aesthetic and performance simultaneously present her as an average, relatable teen girl, and as sexually desirable (Kennedy, 2020). D’Amelio captures the desires of young girls who are fans of teen TikTok celebrities of envy, obsession, self-comparison, and desire. In many ways, her TikTok account can be viewed as the template for success on the platform. With this in mind, it is notable that the most popular and successful sex ed content creators on TikTok are the ones with the closest proximity to D’Amelio’s privileged identities. They are young, thin, white women whose aesthetics appeal to youth visual culture. Not only are they more relatable to TikTok’s primary audience, but they are also more likely to be boosted by the algorithm for fitting into conventional eurocentric beauty standards deemed desirable and more attractive to wider audiences by the app. The most popular peer-led sex educators on the app by a wide margin are @itskatiehaan with 292.8 thousand followers and 4.2 million likes (Haan, n.d.) and @tiddygoals with 228.5 thousand followers and 6.1 million likes (Lily, n.d.). Both creators are under the age of twenty-five and are self-appointed, TikTok sex ed “big sisters” who use their platforms to answer questions and educate others on topics relating to sex, sexuality, and relationships. Neither of them are experts on sex education, nor do they claim to be. They often cite sources, such as SIECUS and Planned Parenthood, in their TikToks to direct young users of the app to accurate and affirming sources of comprehensive sex education. While their content may make a positive impact on users, their popularity can be partly attributed to TikTok’s desirability politics rather than solely their performances as pop sex educators.
Other practitioners of popular sex education (pop sex ed) on TikTok are those who provide professional sex education such as doctors, sexologists, sex therapists, and licensed sex educators. Like edutainers before them, they seek to balance their content between insightful, educational material and relatable, engaging content that creates a desire to return to their profile in the future (Johnston, 2017). Doctors on TikTok have stressed the importance of giving information to the people who need it by meeting them where they are at. There are many barriers to accessing a conversation with a medical professional for young people and TikTok disrupts that. Rather than having to navigate financial barriers or unwanted conversations with parents, TikTok allows teens and young adults to ask their pressing questions and receive medically accurate responses in an accessible, visual format. “TikTok’s executives have welcomed the platform’s uses for medical professionals. ‘It’s been inspiring to see doctors and nurses take to TikTok in their scrubs to demystify the medical profession,’ said Gregory Justice TikTok’s head of content programming” (Goldberg, 2020). Yet, despite TikTok's bold claim about how welcoming the platform is to doctors, the lived experience of doctors attempting to demystify sex online does not agree. This empty welcoming does not align with the content supression doctors face when creating sexual health education content on the app which can be seen in the vastly different numbers of audience interactions with topics within and outside of sex ed.
For example, in one of Dr. Irobunda’s videos, she uses the green screen effect to reupload a video about safer oral sex practices, such as making a dental dam from a sealed condom, with her sitting in the foreground reacting. In the original video, viewers see latex and plastic wrap applied to a sliced watermelon standing in for the vulva. Dr. Irobunda reacts to her own video affirming her original post while eating watermelon referencing the original post’s imagery and leaning further into the innuendo of eating watermelon and oral sex. The caption reads “This is the reupload #cantstopwontstop #gyno #obgyn #sensitivecontent” (Irobunda, 2021). In the introduction to TikTok’s community guidelines the platform states that content that would typically be removed per the guidelines may be allowed as an exception “under certain limited circumstances, such as educational, documentary, scientific, artistic, or satirical content, content in fictional or professional settings, counterspeech, or content that otherwise enables individual expression on topics of social importance” (TikTok, 2022). In the context of Dr. Irobunda’s video, it could be argued that placing a sheet of latex over a watermelon “implicitly depicts sexual activities” (TikTok, 2022), but according to the exceptions policy from the introduction, as a doctor and educator her content is perfectly acceptable.
In the community guidelines, TikTok references exceptions made for educational content in three locations. First, the introduction, and then in the sections titled “Hateful behavior” and “Weapons.” There is no mention of exceptions for sex education, but there are written exceptions for slurs and weapons. TikTok defines slurs as derogatory terms intended to harm groups or individuals based on: “Race, Ethnicity, National origin, Religion, Caste, Sexual orientation, Sex, Gender, Gender identity, Serious disease, Disability, Immigration status” (TikTok, 2022). The platform states that they remove all slurs from the site, “Unless the terms are reappropriated, used self-referentially (i.e., by members of the protected group), or used in a way that does not disparage (e.g., educational context)” (TikTok, 2022).
The next educational exception appears in the “Weapons” subsection of TikTok’s “Illegal activities and regulated goods” policy. It explains that firearms, explosive weapons and firearm accessories are prohibited from being depicted, promoted, or traded on the app. However, TikTok “May allow depiction when appearing in educational contexts (e.g., as part of a museum's collection), involving authorized government personnel (e.g., a police officer) or used in a safe and controlled environment (e.g., shooting range, recreational hunting)” (TikTok, 2022). Both of these exceptions demonstrate that topics or objects that threaten safety can be depicted for educational purposes presumably in the interest of harm reduction. Slurs are often used to make marginalized communities feel unwelcome and unsafe, they can also be precursors to physical violence, and firearms and explosives have the actual potential to kill. While being exposed to sex online is uncomfortable, no one to my knowledge has ever brought their dad’s porn to school and killed their classmates with it. If TikTok believes that young people can handle learning about weapons and hate speech online without recreating it, why is the same not true when it comes to sex education? These guidelines selectively mistake discomfort for danger and danger for discomfort. Not expressing educational exceptions for representations of sex, sexuality, and the body reveals the fear associated with sexual bodily autonomy for young people and stigma against anyone who could facillitate sexual education and empowerment, especially sex workers.
Despite the potential for TikTok to be a platform that enables education, it silences (some) educators in the name of safety. Chicago-based sex educator, Kim Cavill, turned to TikTok to give public sex education because TikTok is the primary place her students hang out. In one video she addressed a popular topic in her class: How to properly open a condom wrapper. “‘People say, ‘I open it with my teeth because it looks hotter.’ Because that’s what porn does as an embellishment, and that makes condoms not work,’ Cavill said.” The video count quickly climbed with over 3,000 views in less than an hour. “Suddenly, the post disappeared with Cavill getting a notification that it ‘violated TikTok’s community guidelines.’” The response she eventually received from a TikTok spokesperson was a line repeatedly used by TikTok: “Our guidelines are designed to keep our community safe and welcoming for everyone...” (Demopoulos, 2019). Does sex education threaten users’ safety? Or, is it threatening the safety of hegemony and moral traditions?
TikTok’s user base is largely comprised of young adults who are a part of gen z. In March 2022 TikTok has approximately 1.2 billion monthly users globally with 43% of those users being between the ages of 18 and 24 years old (“TikTok by the Numbers,” 2022). It is, therefore, arguably, an age group that would be safer with the knowledge of how to properly use a condom. “The company’s latest advertising audience figures suggest that 15.9% of all people aged 18 and above around the world use TikTok today” (Kent, 2022). TikTok’s global reach can not be underestimated, nor can the ways its moderation policies have the ability to reify hegemonic power structures rooted in cis-hetero-patriarchal and white supremacist values. When representations or discussions of sex and sexuality that deviate from TikTok’s standards and can not be commodified are suppressed, young people around the world lose a vital resource of education, validation, and empowerment. “For any number of doctors and influencers preaching sex-positivity, it can be extraordinarily difficult to broach any topic at all without the fear of a video being removed internally” (Dumais, 2021). This anxiety felt by doctors and influencers is a byproduct of anti-sex work design that limits sex-positive content regardless of the source in order to discourage sex workers from promoting their work or otherwise participating on TikTok. In a content analysis of sex education on TikTok, a US-based research team identified that TikTok’s algorithm seems to have the ability to recognize educational videos about the human body: “The app does not regulate or oversee the content or provide disclaimers about misinformation or unverified claims beyond prohibiting and moderating the production of pornographic or otherwise inappropriate content” (Fowler, et al., 2021). This brings up TikTok’s poor evaluation of risk, the app constructs pornography as more harmful than misinformation about sexual health. Comprehensive sex education could mediate risk of youth encountering both sexual health misinformation and pornography by providing tools for young people to assess the value, accuracy, and safety of what they are watching.
