In public discourse, TikTok is often described as a platform for superficial entertainment and ‘online drama.’ Yet for many young people, it has become a significant arena for informal education. Research increasingly suggests that social media, including TikTok, now plays a central role in how young people acquire political information and develop political attitudes, often surpassing traditional news media and formal education in reach and relevance.
The Problem with PSHE
Political literacy is commonly defined as the knowledge, skills and values needed to understand political processes and participate meaningfully in democratic life. In the UK, these aims are partly embedded in statutory guidance for Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE), which requires schools to equip pupils with knowledge of healthy relationships, consent and safeguarding, including sexual harassment and abuse. However, implementation is uneven, time is limited, and some schools feel underprepared to address complex or sensitive issues such as gender-based violence (GBV), coercive control and online misogyny. In this context, young people are turning to TikTok to fill gaps in their understanding of power, rights and justice.
During election cycles, for example, TikTok users produce series explaining how voting systems work, what different parties stand for, and how specific policies might affect renters, students or marginalised communities. Around major protests, creators offer information on legal rights, including guidance on stop-and-search powers or what to expect if arrested. These videos often circulate far more widely among teenagers than traditional civic education resources or public information campaigns.
The Power of TikTok
Alongside this overtly political content, TikTok also hosts extensive discussions about misogyny, harassment, coercive control and ‘red flags’ in relationships, which are all now routine parts of many young people’s feeds. Here, political literacy is less about parliamentary procedure and more about recognising how power operates in everyday life — who is believed, whose safety is prioritised, and how institutions respond when harm occurs.
Teenage girls and young women, in particular, are at the forefront of these conversations. Despite being caricatured as ‘addicted to TikTok,’ they are generating and circulating some of the most sophisticated grassroots analysis of consent, safety and gendered violence online. Videos unpacking recent cases of domestic abuse, sexual assault or institutional failure are frequently accompanied by comment threads in which users ask precise, practical questions: What constitutes evidence? What options exist if the police do not act? How does the law distinguish between harassment and ‘just a joke’? Other users respond with references to legal guidance, links to support services, and explanations grounded in lived experience. When creators dissect how the media reports on male violence, how courts treat survivors, or how certain influencers normalise coercive behaviour, they implicitly shift attention from the actions of victims to the choices and accountability of perpetrators.
In these ways, TikTok’s comment sections often function as ad hoc seminars. Rather than a top-down model of instruction, political understanding is negotiated collectively, in real time. While this is far from a controlled learning environment, it does reflect a form of participatory political education: users are not merely consuming information but interrogating it, challenging interpretations and connecting personal experiences to wider patterns.
Living with TikTok’s Evil Alter Ego
However, the platform’s role in this space is complex and ambivalent. TikTok’s algorithm can amplify high-quality, evidence-based content, but it can just as easily promote misogynistic creators, conspiracy theories and misleading legal and health ‘advice.’ Educational videos coexist with disinformation, targeted harassment and content that minimises or mocks survivors’ experiences. Studies of TikTok and political information emphasise the importance of critical media literacy, noting that without skills to evaluate credibility and detect bias, young people are vulnerable to disinformation and polarising content. Many creators who provide nuanced commentary on politics, gender or justice also report burnout, harassment and pressure to react instantly to every new development, leaving little time for research or fact-checking.
None of this suggests that TikTok should replace formal education, or that its content should be uncritically embraced as authoritative. TikTok should not be romanticised as a safe solution to institutional shortcomings, nor treated as a substitute for properly resourced, evidence-based RSE and PSHE. Rather, it highlights an urgent need for change. When young people say they have learned more about consent or coercion from TikTok than from school, they are not celebrating the platform; they are highlighting a failure elsewhere. If the most detailed, candid and context-rich discussions of gender-based violence, political rights and institutional responses are happening in short-form videos made by peers and young adults, then official curricula are clearly not keeping pace with lived reality.
To continue to frame TikTok only as a distraction or ‘drama’ is, increasingly, to miss the point. For many young people, it is not just entertainment but one of the few places where their questions about politics, safety and justice are being asked — and, however imperfectly, answered.
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