By Andy Hirschfeld
Tensions are especially high across the globe right now, and on TikTok, knee-jerk reactions may drive some people into—or out of—their 15 minutes of fame. With that comes both empowerment and validation, but also hurtful comments and hateful threats.
And these TikTok creators are not just a username but real people who can be left in the dust financially when they are mysteriously “shadowbanned” (when an account’s visibility is temporarily restricted without letting the creator know) off the very platform they depend on.
When Deja Went Viral
This includes people like Deja Foxx, featured in TikTok, Boom., who came to fame after she confronted Arizona’s then-Senator Jeff Flake (R) at a town hall. Foxx called out Sen. Flake over his support to remove Title X funding from clinics like Planned Parenthood.
The clip of the incident went viral. Within days she was making the rounds on national TV news programs, telling CNN “I can’t sit idly by while women like me are countlessly and constantly being ignored on Capitol Hill.”
But the what of this incident is just as vital as the why.
A native of Tucson, Arizona, Foxx grew up housing insecure. Her mother struggled with substance abuse issues which meant having to find another place to live. Those personal pressures impacted her life at school.
“When I got into high school, my freshman year, I was in student council and I was on the volleyball team. I was friends with a lot of people, but by the time sophomore year rolled around, just one year later, things in my home deteriorated pretty quickly,” Foxx said.
“I just couldn’t really keep up anymore, I remember I lost my spot on the volleyball team because the coach told me I had a bad attitude. I didn’t win re-election to the student council that year. I lost a lot of friends.”
Foxx said that her teachers and administrators took notice of her behavior shift. “I was getting in a lot of trouble that was a direct result of my changing circumstances at home.” She often had to leave early from school and would miss homework because of her after-school job at a gas station.
Through that struggle, she found and began to get involved with Planned Parenthood. The group was an avenue for the leadership qualities she embodied.
That ultimately led to her viral moment, which then led to hateful comments she received as a young girl online, alongside her subsequent successes in the public eye, including her role on Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Now living in New York City, Foxx attends Columbia University, able to put herself through college with revenue she earned through TikTok. She’s involved in numerous advocacy roles, is a model for Ford Models, and a licensed bartender (which she doesn’t do for work but more to host happy hours with friends).
While her virality came with hatred from the right, they’ve had their share of problems on the TikTok platform, too.
Libertarian-Conservativism from Campus to TikTok
Brad Polumbo is a libertarian-conservative journalist and economic policy analyst who has written for numerous outlets including The Washington Examiner, Newsweek, and National Review. Polumbo has roughly 29,000 TikTok followers.
In November 2021, he posted a video that was reported as bullying and harassment. However, his clip, albeit controversial, was arguably not what TikTok alleged it was. Polumbo more or less defended Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two men and wounded another amid civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and was ultimately found not guilty in a contentious trial that gained international attention.
From Polumbo’s perspective, he wasn’t defending Rittenhouse’s actions but rather his “right to have presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a jury of peers.” Polumbo said this is why he called out progressive Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) about his remarks before a verdict had been reached. (Jeffries had said “Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.”)
Polumbo’s clip was reported to TikTok and he noticed very quickly—by evaluating his viewership metrics—that his videos weren’t making it to TikTok’s “For You” discovery page and was only pushed to his followers.
“I think [a full ban] would really hurt because my job and my growth is rooted in trying to reach Generation Z,” Polumbo says. “It would be a tremendous hurdle if I could not access TikTok.”
From his perspective, Polumbo’s shadowban on TikTok strongly echoes his experiences in academia as an economics student at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
At the time, he said he was largely apolitical. But he was turned off by the approach of the school’s economics department which had a reputation for “Marxist traditions and radical economics,” according to the Boston Globe in 2016.
Polumbo was vocal in classes about his contrasting economic perspective, despite the campus’s reputation. But he felt that some fellow classmates didn’t speak up because they were “afraid of the reputational repercussions.”
He also felt like there were a lot of conversations about microaggressions towards marginalized groups in the academic and extracurricular setting. Polumbo, who is gay, noted that these conversations did not originate from the marginalized communities themselves.
“In my experience, it was actually pushed on campus, not on behalf of the affected parties but on behalf of the parties that wanted to seem virtuous.”
Kim Rosas and Period Nirvana
For Kim Rosas the issue is not political—it’s business.
She runs a company called Period Nirvana and Period Shop which is a store dedicated to reusable period products. Rosas uses the platform to educate the public about the products available to them.
Rosas started the company in 2020 during the height of the TikTok boom.
Because of the nature of the products, TikTok has often flagged or removed her content suggesting it was sexual in nature.
Her first viral video garnered 1.5 million views. It included a quiz that pointed women toward the best reusable products for them, even if not directly from her store, and often brought in sales from her Shopify platform.
“It was just every 30 seconds, 20 seconds, sales!” Rosas said. “It was the craziest thing that’s ever happened, and nothing since has ever gone as viral from a sales perspective.”
But then her videos, which are instructional in nature, kept getting removed.
“I have some kind of realistic models that I use. Any insertion of something somewhere, tends to tell them [TikTok], ‘This is not good for us.’”
Eventually, she was banned.
She woke up one morning and couldn’t log in. She says she got a notification that her account was banned. She lost everything—all of her content that had been bringing in most of her sales.
“It was an immediate blow. Nothing has the same impact right now,” Rosas said.
Rosas was relatively lucky, as a follower of hers reached out to a personal contact at TikTok to help her reinstate her account. It helped that Rosas has a large social media following elsewhere and that some of her powerful followers can vouch for her.
Rosas is not new to the game. She’s been an expert in the social media space and educating the general public about these reusable products for a decade.
“I was creating content on YouTube, I guess it was [around] 2012. I was kind of the only voice out there telling people how to use the products because it’s a taboo subject people don’t feel comfortable talking about online.”
Her pathway to becoming an influencer in women’s reproductive health wasn’t a direct route. Her original interest was as a cloth diaper educator. She then began using reusable period products herself, and as her children grew up she moved out of the diaper space.
TikTok advocates and influencers are not just an account. They’re real people who are spreading a message important to them, rooted in dynamic life experience, tied to something as important as their personal identity and struggle—and, in many cases, their own financial freedom.
Andy Hirschfeld is a journalist based in New York City. His work has appeared in publications including The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera English, Time Out Magazine, TYT Investigates, and many others. He’s also the business correspondent for the national 24/7 streaming news network NEWSnet. He’s contributed radio pieces for NPR’s American Homefront Project, among others. Previously, he produced for CNN, CBS, and Bloomberg News. Follow him at @andyreports on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.