Serious TikTok: Can You Learn About the Holocaust in 60 seconds?

Abstract

In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a primarily entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format that we describe as “serious TikTok.” In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to playfully unpack complex topics, contextualize and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained particular attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s memetic vernaculars to produce more stimulating historical storytelling formats.

Playful Activism: Memetic Performances of Palestinian Resistance in TikTok #Challenges

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A learning ecology-based approach for enhancing Digital Holocaust Memory in European cultural heritage education

“…While fictionalised stories based on historical documents contribute to the broader Holocaust narrative [ 88 , 89 ], social media have also become a place where survivors and their descendants share personal stories and testimonies, providing unique insights into the Holocaust [ 90 ]. Finally, social media is where museums and archives make their collections available online, allowing users to access primary sources such as documents and photographs [ [91] , [92] , [93] ].…”

The dead pig's photo album: Affective visual rituals in collective identity formation

“…As with space, collective witnessing may also collapse temporal boundaries. For example, today the Holocaust continues to be ‘witnessed’ and commemorated through the use of short video-memes and visual storytelling on TikTok (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021; Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Divon, 2022). Such affective imagery has at times employed extreme aesthetics for emotional resonance.…”