SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISMROGER YATES
As part of the two-day Global Vegfest event organised by VegfestUK in September, 2021, I chaired a panel discussion on “social media activism” with a group of activists. These activists were Nella from Greece, Rob from Scotland, and Jennifer and Shane from Ireland, who, in the main, are using TikTok but also other social media platforms as forms of vegan education. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, TikTok does not issue many public statistics about the platform, although it is estimated that it has roughly 1 billion monthly users. It is accessible in more than 150 countries in more than 70 languages and, in 2020, was the most popular downloaded application in the world. TikTok users are said to spend over 14 hours on the site every month. So, one of the main reasons for animal activists using TikTok is that they believe it enables them to escape “the vegan bubble” (see previous article ‘The Clock is TikTokking’). This is one of the issues the Global Vegfest panel discussed. 76
FORÇA VEGAN
Once a user gets more than 1000 “followers,” they can supplement the usual 1-3 minute videos with livestreams on the platform. Rob and Jennifer often “go live” on TikTok. While many TikTokkers show themselves on their lives, answering written questions in a “chat” area on screen, or inviting people on to talk, Rob and Jennifer specialise in showing on the screen slogans, magazine pages, and vegan leaflets in order to bring in an audience. There is much that is a mystery on TikTok, so each appearance on the platform produces a different engagement result. For example, the panellist’s lives have created audiences ranging from around 100 people to as many as 135,000. In an ironic way, creating a large audience on TikTok can create a problem in the sense that the on-screen chat moves so quickly that it is hard and sometimes impossible to catch the questions
and, in that circumstance, it doesn’t take long before there are accusations that questions are being ignored. It will not be a surprise to anyone reading this to learn that many comments consist of little else than animal flesh emojis, insults, and insincere questions about protein and the sentience of plants. However, many people are clearly engaging in order to learn about vegan animal rights. Many serious questions are asked and answered, and some challenging issues are raised, such as “crop deaths” and what a future vegan world would look like. Some of the panel report that people have made contact to say that their content has encouraged them to check out vegan philosophy and to begin to live vegan. Outside of the wonderful world of TikTok, Nella talked about the utility that social media provided during the
