Youth activism and (de)personalized remix on TikTok

Social media has provided everyday actors with a platform to share their personal stories and ideas. This has had a profound effect on activism, as movements are increasingly built up and amplified through the circulation of participants’ individualized motivations, experiences, and sentiments. TikTok has emerged as a salient site for studying this turn: it has proven to be a highly successful tool in activist campaigns, strongly affords personalized communication, and supports a main user base of young people known for emphasizing self-expression in their online participation. Since remix is the core form of sharing on TikTok, users are encouraged to insert and articulate themselves not only in the process of content creation, but in the process of circulation as well. Here, we focus on the way remix is exploited as a mode of personalizing activist content on TikTok, particularly among young users. We do so by qualitatively coding and analyzing remixed content associated with the digital activist organization Gen-Z for Change. We find that, despite expectations based on prior research and the observed behavior of older users, young users tended to resist personalization in their remix strategies. Yet, they simultaneously managed to assert their presence in ways that are meaningful on the app. Our results elaborate on digital activist strategies and the role of platform affordances therein, and add important nuance to common conceptions of youth political participation styles.