The young
have been getting a bad rap for wanting to party on while COVID-19 sends the
world into lockdown. But a different movie is playing itself out on the social
platform that is growing fastest among teenagers: TikTok.
Awareness campaigns by TikTok itself, collaboration with the
International Red Cross, and spontaneous videos made by TikTok creators have
combined into a barrage of information, education, awareness and social
consciousness around the coronavirus.
Both globally and in South Africa, TikTok’s COVID-19 campaigns have gone viral.
The local #HayiCorona challenge, designed to remind people not to touch their face and wash hands regularly, has passed 1.5-million views. The TikTok collaboration with the International Red Cross, the #WashingHands challenge, has passed 12.6-million views.
One of the best-known participants in these challenges is the past year’s icon of South African talent, the Ndlovu Youth Choir, took up the global challenge with a 20-second hand-washing video. It put together a performance that brings tremendous energy to what can be a clichéd message, and ends with a punt for the Department of Health’s WhatsApp information service. The video can be viewed below.
“On a
global scale, TikTok also partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) to
ensure that, while creators are still having fun and expressing themselves on
the platform, they stay informed with COVID-19 information coming from a
reliable source,” a TikTok spokesperson told us. “Through the partnership, the
WHO has created an informational page on TikTok that offers information to curb
the spread of the coronavirus as well as dispelling myths.”
The page
can be viewed at https://vm.tiktok.com/GHTEGf
TikTok has hosted a number of livestreams with WHO experts, attracting users from more than 70 countries, tuning in for live question and answer sessions. It has also introduced labels on coronavirus-related videos, to point users to trusted information. Resources are also offered directly in the app and in a dedicated COVID-19 section of TikTok’s Safety Center, at https://www.tiktok.com/safety/resources/covid-19.
If users simply want to explore videos on the topic, they can search via the #coronavirus hashtag, or click on https://vm.tiktok.com/swKbn4. The hashtag has had an astonishing 33.8-billion views, indicating the scale of activity and interest around the topic on the platform.
Read more on the next page about how South Africans have embraced the campaign.
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