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This article explores TikTok users' responses to a racist incident at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. We analyse the content strategies of TikToks that received the most engagement as well as a timeline of TikToks to analyse how the framing of the event shifted over time. We consider TikTok as a space for youth to reflect on everyday politics in highly personalized ways and to develop their voice and visibility through particular content strategies. We firstly argue that South African youth frame local political acts within global frameworks to link their own political realities to algorithmically recognized global causes. In addressing both local audiences and the algorithm, activists construct messages with potentially broader algorithmic visibility that speak both to their highly localized context and to a global generation Z audience. We caution that such global framings of local political events may limit engagement with local complexities. Secondly, we argue that similar to TikTok activism globally, we observe the 'memefication' or 'templatibility' of activist messages on TikTok, where users juxtapose a political message with an audio meme or 'earworm'. By doing this, South African users mobilize increased visibility and insert these intertextual political messages within existing 'imitation publics' that algorithmically congregate around such global memes, infusing new meaning into the affective language of global youth culture, while injecting playfulness into local political culture. We therefore argue that TikTok's power is essentially glocal, as it allows local issues to be reframed through global discourses and memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study uses the domestication model to describe how a geographically based gossip mobile website, Outoilet (old toilet), helped to shape the meanings of everyday life for young adults in Hooggenoeg, a poor black low-income urban settlement in Grahamstown, South Africa. All the residents here know one another and there is very little privacy, and the mobile phone, during the period of this research, reinforced the lack of privacy through gossip. Such gossip promoted an inward-looking collective sociability. As this article demonstrates, subjects of gossip avoided the streets to escape collective surveillance. Outoilet's explicit sexual language seemed to target those who attempted social mobility by replicating local discourses of respectability and shame. Contrary to findings from other contexts, the mobile phone here thus promoted a collective sociability and may have discouraged mobility as well as economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]