This Former Republican Is Sharing How TikTok Completely Changed Her Worldview, And It's The Most Hopeful Thing I've Seen In Weeks
TikTok
When TikTok's endless feed of videos resumed, it welcomed users back with another message thanking President Trump. A viral tweet at the time criticized the note, saying in part, "trump getting all of the praise and glory, despite his cabinet introducing the bill in the first place."
Shortly before the TikTok ban was set to go into effect, 31-year-old Krystina Koepnick (@blissfullykrys) posted a viral video about how the app has completely changed her worldview, and it's a really fascinating story.
In the video, Krystina shares, "I was a conservative Republican when I joined TikTok." She goes on to explain that she joined in 2021, and described herself then as being on the "New Age spirituality to alt-right pipeline."
This "pipeline" she's talking about is a way of describing the trend of algorithmically-driven online content leading users down a rabbit hole that starts with spirituality and ends in conspiracy theories, aka " conspirituality."
But, she says that what she saw on TikTok ended up challenging and ultimately changing her worldview. Krystina told BuzzFeed that she was already working on herself a lot when she began to seek out different perspectives on TikTok. "And as I was deciding what kind of person I wanted to be in this world, I also noticed that the Republican party that I had grown up a part of continued to shift more and more deeply into ideologies and beliefs that didn't reflect the type of person that I wanted to be. And as the Republican Party seemed to move more and more to the right, I felt like I was being left behind."
"So really, the extremism on the right is really what led me to see what the left (and TikTok) was all about. One of the first leftist creators on TikTok that I remember coming across who really helped me to understand propaganda and the way that our views of America are manipulated, both from within and from the outside, was Madeleine Pendleton."
Krystina told BuzzFeed that those videos made her start to question, "How much of what I have always believed was fed to me without me ever questioning it or thinking twice about it? And I started to think to myself that maybe a lot of what I've heard about what the left stands for and believes in also isn't what I've been told. So, I sought out more leftist perspectives on my own, with an open mind, to gain more perspective and to see the world through a lens that I had never considered before."
But she says it wasn't so easy to really hear these new perspectives in the beginning. "At first, hearing perspectives from 'the other side of the aisle' immediately triggers a defensive response because when you grow up in an echo chamber of people who believe the same things about the world as you do, and you aren't exposed to alternative perspectives, those alternative perspectives challenge the ego in a way that feels unsafe, and so we get defensive about it. I really had to work through those feelings of defensiveness that automatically arose within me if I really wanted to absorb the information and be able to come to my own conclusions about what I believe."
"One thing the TikTok algorithm does very well is bring you more content related to content that you've been seeking out. As I watched and listened to just a few leftist creators at first, my page began to be populated with more and more leftist creators. And as I listened to more people share their stories, their perspectives and their personal experiences, I realized that my values aligned a lot more with these new people that I was being exposed to. Once the discomfort of my ego was resolved, I felt like I had finally found people who value the same things that I value and are motivated in the same ways that I'm motivated to do our part in changing society."
"So much of what I had been told about the left turned out to be just flat-out untrue, and more and more, I started to feel at home on the left. Especially when I started sharing my story, I was met by such warmth and welcoming by the people on the left. So many people have reached out to say that they share the exact same story as me, that TikTok also helped them learn and gain perspective that ultimately led them to change their political views as well. And that feeling of acceptance, despite who I might've been in my past, is something that I don't think can be put into words. It feels like I finally found my people because I finally found myself, as cliché as that sounds."
And in her video, Krystina says that she knows she's not the only one, and shares a hopeful message for the future. "A seed grows underground first and for a while. And what we're witnessing is that the insides of a lot of Americans have changed. A lot of us have deconstructed the house of cards inside of us, right? And that might not be showing in modern society quite yet, or in today's society quite yet. Right outside, fascism keeps growing, but inside, our little seeds are growing, and eventually, those seeds will break through the surface, and they will be seen, and they will be seen everywhere, and it'll happen."
Finally, Krystina told BuzzFeed, "I think there's a misconception that 'TikTok changed my mind' when really I was the one who changed my own mind by being open to new perspectives and new information, but TikTok was the classroom in which I was able to connect with people who I would then learn from. I learned so much from normal everyday people just sharing their own experiences and perspectives, but also from experts in various fields: economics, law, medicine, and politics, to name a few."
"People like to say that TikTok is just for kids and dancing videos, but it truly is a powerful resource if you know how to use it. Compared to other social media apps that I've used, TikTok, more than any of them, allowed me to break out of the bubble of everything that I thought I knew about the world and expose myself to completely different ways of thinking. I wouldn't say that TikTok changed me so much as it allowed me to change myself."
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Trump's talk of investigations into perceived adversaries from years ago let him, in effect, go back in time to deflect attention from a very current crisis. 'Whether it's right or wrong,' Trump said, 'it's time to go after people.' Megerian and Tucker write for the Associated Press.
