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1. 1 2022-06-15T14:08:56-07:00 Mikayla Knight 1a410d081ea3baa69433b2b7aa834bddd2a36d7b About TikTok Mikayla Knight 9 image_header 2022-06-24T10:39:33-07:00 Mikayla Knight 1a410d081ea3baa69433b2b7aa834bddd2a36d7b

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• 1 2022-06-15T14:00:10-07:00 CHAPTER 2: HISTORY AND CONTEXT 5 plain 2022-06-16T14:08:51-07:00 Pornography and Social Networking Sites (SNS) are primary sites of sex education in the United States and beyond. Sex educators agree that “Pornography is the new sex ed” (Fonte et al., 2022; The Porn Conversation, 2022) and many educators, health professionals, and sex-positive activists have turned to TikTok to teach young people and combat the sexual misinformation and negativity present online. “‘Right now the place to be educating young people about sexual health, or answering their burning questions is not a doctor’s office. It’s on TikTok,’ says Dr. Heather Irobunda, a registered OBGYN with nearly 40,000 TikTok followers” (Dumais, 2021). Currently, TikTok is “the answer” to the disparities caused by sex education being a geographically linked subject. Some have called sex education a ‘postcode lottery’ for young people around the world (Smith Galer, 2022).  Since sex education is differently impacted by moral conservativism based on the location in which it is taught, TikTok has the potential to be an equalizing force of education that is medically accurate and intersectional. Competing narratives of what is appropriate for young people, or rather what produces and maintains youth safety as it relates to sex, sexuality, and relationships, are exhibited in schools, in public policy, in social media community guidelines, and in popular media. Discourses around sex education and safety often demonstrate clear political and moral ideologies dominating different outputs of culture and thought. These competing discourses of what is safe/ty as it connects to young people’s access to sex education reveal the interconnected nature of morality, innocence, sex education, sex work, and pornography. In response to the inaccessibility, inaccuracy, and flat-out absence of sex education in many parts of the US, children and teens rely on other potential resources of Sexuality and Relationship Education (SRE) like social media that can meet their sometimes-urgent needs. It is not new for young people to turn to media to fill the gaps in their sex education. For older generations, the gaps were filled by asking cosmo and reading magazine columns, by Google and Youtube, and by Reddit and Tumblr (Demopoulos, 2019). TikTok has been described as “Reddit for Gen Z: There are threads, subcategories, canals of information… And since the algorithm keeps track of your activity, it submerges you deeper into your own pocket of the internet” (Dumais, 2021). Since TikTok’s algorithm creates a hyperspecific “for you page” for each user, it is likely that users who encounter SRE on the platform are either intentionally seeking it out on TikTok, or their behavior online indicates they may be interested in seeing sex education content. The narrative that sexual content is randomly finding and corrupting children online is false and takes away young people’s agency. Children and teens are curious. As they grow up and are exposed to their first period, growing hair in new places, getting hard randomly, crushes, first kisses, late-night texting and facetiming, dating, school dances, pregnancies in their communities, friends “losing their virginity,” youtube, porn pop-up ads, Omegle, Chatroulette, Kik, Tumblr, Snapchat, Tinder, and TikTok, it is only natural that they will have some questions. Our physical and cyberworlds are saturated with messages about sex, when and how you have it, why, and with who. If TikTok can answer some of their questions from the comfort of a familiar app in the privacy of being beyond a screen, why shouldn’t it?