“I want people to get a fuller story of the political situation that’s out there, and jokes and memes have always left me in a place where I’m like, ‘Oh, that made me laugh,’ and then, ‘Why did that make me laugh? Let me investigate what this thing’s about.’”

Young leftists are breaking down the points behind their political ideology on TikTok to make it easier for the next generation of voters to understand and get pulled into socialism.

Leftist TikTok creators are booming on the platform, putting out content in just the last month that has collectively amassed hundreds of thousands of views and sparked conversations with other users about leftist movements. For some, creators told BuzzFeed News, TikTok is just an entry point to combat what they see as a battle between the populist left and right for the next generation of voters. “Yo yo yo! Inviting y’all to the motherfuckin’ revolution,” Gem Nwanne said in their rendition of a TikTok trend where creators parody party announcements over bars of a Chief Keef song. “Location? Around the world. Time? Right the fuck now! Cost? Your privilege. We talkin’ BYO skillset! No cops!”

In another TikTok posted a little over a week later, Nwanne hopped on another trend where they danced to a clip of “I Gets Crazy,” a deep-cut Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne song, while listing out the “stages of radical politicization.” In the clip, Nwanne bops to the song as the different stages of radicalized political thought pop up onscreen. In the 10 second clip, “all full-time workers should be able to afford food and shelter” quickly progresses into “take back the means of production, eat the rich & secure the safety of all people” as Nwanne dances more erratically. The video has over 195,000 views and 40,000 likes.



Those audio and video give creators the freedom to twist and riff for a moment of virality, thousands of likes, or hopefully a few thousand follows from the millions of people that have logged onto the app.

Nwanne said that when they first started using TikTok, they only wanted to use it to watch memes. Their friends had told them it was a funny, lighthearted space on the internet similar to Vine, which had shut down in early 2017. Since Nwanne started making their own TikToks in early November, they’ve already grown their account to over 14,000 followers. They joined the ranks of a number of other leftist creators who’ve been making content about leftist ideology, dragging presidential candidates and their supporters’ dances, and supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders (whose hashtags, like #bernie2020, have over 30,000,000 views on the app). “I noticed that there was this whole coalition of Gen-Z that’s doing political content, and there’s a whole other side of TikTok that’s extremely conservative, I mean literal cops. I noticed there was a lack of diversity among the people that were making this political content,” said Nwanne. “They weren’t talking about race and they weren’t talking about queerness. They weren’t talking to my people.” Nwanne, a former college Republican and a former member of Democratic Socialists of America, said their motivation for their TikTok is to break down the ideas behind socialism and leftist politics to get people interested and make them as accessible as possible for younger people who might not know that their political ideas just might be the basis of a leftist ideology. “The idea is to break these things down into the smallest bits, use accessible language, put them to music, get something to look at and smile at, and make jokes,” said Nwanne. “It’s explaining these concepts without all of the academia. I think the thing that keeps so many people of color and working-class people away from leftist ideas is how they’re presented, and my entire goal was to make this stuff as accessible as possible.” Other TikTok creators told BuzzFeed News that they’d noticed more teens on the app posting content about anti-capitalist positions, even though they might not be specifically speaking from a position of someone who’s done research about democratic socialism or leftist politics. Jokes about eating the rich and critiques of billionaires like Bill Gates have gone viral on the platform. “Just replace the government with TikTok teens,” reads one tweet of a popular TikTok video. In it, a teenager visits a website that lets you spend Gates’ money and notices that no spending makes a significant dent in his wealth. The video wraps with the teen telling the camera, “and then there’s me telling myself not to buy food on my lunch break at work to save some money.” The video’s been retweeted 92,000 times and has been viewed 5.5 million times.

Just replace the government with Tik Tok teens

Isra Hirsi, the cofounder of the US Youth Climate Strike and the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, hopped on a trend where creators dance to the chorus of a Flo Milli song. While she dances under a sign that says “capitalism taking ur man,” the lyrics “Yea bitch, I got your man, an, an! If you bad, ho, come catch him if you can, an, an” loop. She then dances under signs that read “insane student debt,” “not being able to make a living wage,” and “overly expensive medical bills, rent and the fear of never being financially stable” as the reasons that capitalism snatched “your man.” Her tweet of the TikTok has been viewed over 300,000 times.



here’s some anti capitalist content from this zoomer 😎