At 33, I recognise that I am too old for TikTok, the Chinese-owned super-platform on which teenagers mouth along to songs and make super-short funny videos. I am at peace with this. As a child of the internet, someone who has worked through MySpace and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram (and Habbo Hotel and Chatroulette and phpBB, and a whole afternoon wasted on Second Life), it is interesting to see an online platform and recognise that it is not for me: that I am equipped with all of the tools that I need to live the rest of my life now, and none of them involve learning the dance to Say So.
There is a dense un-understandability to the styles and habits of TikTok; it feels like a generational baton being passed. Let the people born after the first iPod was released have their TikTok. This does not have to affect me.
Unless, of course, every Labour MP gets on the platform, and then it will impact – extremely negatively – on my life. As the Times reported last week, after a small flurry of incidents in which TikTok users impersonated Labour MPs and used images of them to produce some “malicious parodies”, the party ordered all of its MPs to sign up and “secure your username” on the site, whether they intend to ever use it or not. Yes, yes, it may feel small now, but I cannot help but think that this is a news story we will refer back to in six or seven years’ time, the watershed moment we will point to and say: “Anyway, that’s why we had to dissolve the concept of Westminster. Because Keir Starmer kept pretending to snap sunglasses on to his face while asking for more police officers.”
The idea of Labour (or any) MPs on TikTok is bad for three reasons – one of them being that this is the first step down the slippery slope to diluting the platform forever. There is always this beautiful, chaotic, lawless moment in the early lifespan of a social media platform, as the logo cycles through various redesigns, platform-specific celebrities arise (the early Stephen Fry days of Twitter! Who could forget!), and users slowly start to shape the tone and the texture of the place outside of the specific vision of the designers who created it.
Then brands come along, secure blue ticks, and flood what was previously a creative free-for-all with a sort of smooth, copy-of-a-copy version of the ascendant voice: “The new flamin’ hot Whopper is #bae!”, that sort of thing. Right now, TikTok is an ever-scrolling house party of the soul. The last thing it needs is a Labour MP in a blazer walking in and saying, “Y’all need to vote for the party that cares.”
Second, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how skilled the young people who use the platform every second of every day actually are compared with any MPs looking to join up. Anyone who has ever crossed K-pop stans – a many-peopled army who download the profile picture of anyone they disagree with on Twitter and publicly play noughts and crosses on their foreheads – will know this already. Young people are using the internet with a frequency adults cannot possibly tune into, and they do not care about the consequences.
If an MP makes an earnest TikTok outlining policy – a 60-second shimmy explaining why the Brexit deal is good, for instance – it will be endlessly remixed, dunked on, dueted and autotuned, from the second the TikTok is released until the very last day that MP serves in parliament. An MP posting on TikTok will never sleep soundly again. They will wake up abruptly in the dark, heavy, blue hours of the night knowing that, somewhere in America, a teen in a Maga hat is somehow breakdancing over their early day motion.
And third, I just cannot help but think that MPs – who have barely grasped the intricacies of Twitter, the app where all you have to do is be able to read and write to post – are doomed to fail on a platform that values humour, hyper-postmodern aesthetics and the ability to dance convincingly. For Labour MPs it seems like a particular misstep – broadly, young people are going to vote Labour no matter what, unless they go on their favourite app and see their potential MP slowly do the Rollie wrong, and then they won’t.
At this point, it feels like MPs claiming their own usernames from so-called pranksters is actually the complete inverse of the right move – for an MP, letting a prankster use your name for clout is probably better reputationally speaking than, say, going online and being yourself. If you wanted to take it further, each Labour MP could assign a representative teen to dance for them on TikTok, explaining along to chart hits why abstaining from voting is actually good. That way they could spend more time, say, robustly opposing a government that has somehow held an iron-strong polling lead despite spending an entire year completely mishandling a pandemic. These are just ideas, obviously. I just don’t feel like forcing Ed Miliband to dab is actually the way out of this one.
Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant