Patricia Perez Utra is a freshman from Miami planning to major in Political Science (concentrating in International Relations) and French, with a minor in Financial Economics.
TikTok. In 2025, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone over the age of ten who hasn’t at the very least heard of it. TikTok is a short-form content app, hosting roughly 120 million US users. TikTok is home to millions of short-form videos covering a wide range of topics, for an even wider and more diverse audience. TikTok was set to be banned in the US in mid-January. The ban, you probably remember, lasted for less than a day—but the brief detox offered a moment to reflect on the cultural significance of the app, particularly for its Gen Z user base.
TikTok is omnipresent: it’s here, there, and everywhere. Its iconic short-form video style has been adopted by other social media platforms like YouTube Shorts or Instagram reels. TikTok is a 2020s cultural juggernaut, and through the network benefits of its sheer popularity, it led the discussion on popular culture practically since its inception. In particular, It’s been at the forefront of Gen-Z culture (people born between 1997 and 2012). More than 68% of TikTok’s users are under the age of 35, and 63% of teens say they use TikTok.
I’ve been an avid user of TikTok since early 2020 when I downloaded it at the beginning of the lockdown. It got me through many a boring week during virtual school and was—and still is—a source of constant entertainment for me and almost every person I know
It’s not surprising that TikTok has been so well-suited to my generation. Its intuitive algorithm and fast-changing pace make it the perfect match for a generation that’s lived through some of the biggest global technological changes. It has become the defining cultural touchstone for our generation, shaping the way we communicate, grow, and engage with the world.
The New Digital Dialect: How TikTok Shapes Gen Z’s Language
Let’s all be honest with ourselves: how often in 2020 did you use the word “cap” in everyday conversation? How about “Slay”? “Shook”? “Sus”?
What about now? How often do you say “rizz”, joking or otherwise? How about “brat”, “demure”, “yap”, or “let him cook”? If Duke students are reading this, the answer is: a lot.
Beyond just reminding you of just how crazy our conversations sound, I want to first touch on how TikTok has shaped Gen Z slang, and the implications for intergenerational communication. For decades, young people have used slang to distinguish themselves from older generations, coining neologisms to create a unique, distinct linguistic identity. We see this in older generations, and through our perceived view of them, how we identify specific slang and words with them. Think of words like “awesomesauce” or “adulting”? what age group comes to mind first? Millennials, right? Just as other generations have developed their own argot from radio and television, Gen Z has a medium (or rather media) of choice: it is social media, and especially TikTok, where the lingo of youth culture is generated today.
This phenomenon is called “Linguistic Identity Work,” and it’s what has been happening on TikTok since its popularity first skyrocketed in 2020. TikTok brings young people together in constant contact—the digital communities that develop from this communication create their own slang to identify and differentiate themselves from the rest. Eventually, certain words bleed into mainstream use and become acceptable to use in everyday conversation. This used to be the work of writers and journalists—think of Shakespeare and his individual contribution of more than 1,700 words to the English language, including many that we still use today like “gossip” or “fashionable.” Or Lewis Carrol; and all his made-up “nonsense” words like “mimsy.” Today, this work is done by the everyday users of TikTok, who collectively establish new vocabulary and expand the English language with each use of TikTok slang, both in person and online.
Despite our brilliant and 100% not-confusing or convoluted manipulation of the English language, the increased use of slang by Gen-Z has led to intergenerational friction: older generations often say to Gen-Zers: ‘it’s as if we’re speaking a different language.’ I always have to remind myself to control my use of slang when speaking with people much older than me, even with my parents. It’s not just a problem for communicating across age gaps—many scholars contend that the more slang is incorporated into everyday English the harder it is for non-native speakers to learn and understand the language.
However, despite these criticisms, Gen-Z continues to create new slang, and like every generation before it, believes that its colloquialisms will stand the test of time. Whether or not that’s true, we will have to wait to find out. Either way, Gen-Z has its way of putting these slangs to good use. Neologisms have benefits, too. TikTok’s algorithm has been known to catch the use of certain words its creators dislike and imposes shadowbans, i.e. limiting a user’s content or visibility without the user’s knowledge. This in turn leads to the development of “Algospeak” or algorithm-speak—the use of communally recognized code words to subvert the watchful eye of the algorithm. This has allowed many users, such as those in the LBGTQ+ community, to escape censorship and allows the spread of information to continue.
Digital Activism: Political Change in 60 Seconds
Gen Z came of age in unstable times. We are known as the generation of struggle, an epithet primarily attributed to our generation’s growing anxieties about our future.
Growing up with COVID-19, climate anxiety, a housing crisis, and global instability, Gen Z faces constant uncertainty. Promised financial security, we instead see soaring home prices and job struggles, with over 60% still relying on parents. Our generation has grown up with the weight of the inevitable future breathing down our necks. Social media amplifies activism and awareness, which is exactly why Gen-Z has taken to TikTok.
Take, for example, the false mass-registration drive of the Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla in 2020 where thousands of TikTok users registered hundreds of thousands of tickets for the rally and never showed. The users took the information and spread it through alternative communities on TikTok before deleting their videos so they didn’t get spread into the mainstream media. And it worked. The fire marshal counted 6,200 scanned tickets of attendees of the million tickets requested reported by President Trump’s campaign team. As stated by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez: “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok”.
TikTok users are known to utilize trademarks of their generation’s culture to be politically active. For example, TikTok users have used our generation’s talent for taking completely unrelated words and assigning them unique meanings as a means to circumvent the algorithm and speak out politically. Specifically, many users utilize algospeak and emojis to obscure what they’re trying to communicate across the platform. Many users spread news of the war in Gaza or communicate their side of the conflict based on emojis, specifically those that support the Palestinian people taking to using watermelon emojis. They’ve also used hashtags to get their videos to specific communities, with many using the opposite terms they’re talking about to reach another community. This has been done across political spectrums, and whether it’s done to stir conversation or conflict is hard to determine.
Activism in general drives linguistic innovation, even more so when the entity trying to censor works faster than we can think, it drives users to adapt words to evade algorithmic censorship. At the same time, the coded, memetic nature of online language shapes activism, making it more viral, adaptable, and community-driven. This chicken-and-egg dynamic shows how language and activism continuously reshape each other in the Gen-Z culture through TikTok. Language and activism feed into one another, allowing for Gen-Z to continue to do both to the point where it’s hard to tell when one starts and the other ends.
In an era marked by economic uncertainty, political upheaval, and a rapidly changing digital landscape, TikTok has become more than just a social media platform; it’s a space where Gen Z processes and reacts to the world around them.
Final reflections
TikTok is a reflection of Gen-Z’s identities, anxieties, and aspirations. From the ever-changing digital landscape to the rapid-fire transformation of language and fashion, TikTok has shaped—and been shaped by—our generation’s culture. TikTok captures the fast-moving spirit of Gen Z. It’s where we process the chaos of the world, seek out community, and shape the trends that will define our future. But it also means that, if TikTok is where the new generation is focusing the majority of their energy, it is also where the power is shifting. The question we must ask is this: what happens when Gen Z, the first truly digital-native generation, carries its TikTok-shaped worldview into adulthood, workplaces, and positions of influence? Will this hyper-connected, fast-moving culture lead to a more globally inclusive and innovative future? You can take Gen Z out of TikTok, but you can’t take TikTok out of Gen Z. Time will tell what that will mean, and what culture and society the “spirit” of Gen Z will create.
By Patricia Perez Utra
