Something I believe will end up in the history textbooks of the future is the power of the popular social media app TikTok. While TikTok is something available to all people of all ages, the overwhelming majority of its users would fall into the Generation-Z category. And for the purpose of this article, the events I will be discussing were created by “Gen-Zer’s”.
The first event, but certainly not the best, was the action Gen-Z took to change the National Anthem and the American flag. As seen in the image above, Gen-Z wanted to make the new flag for the United States to be black, yellow, and white, with the cartoon version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid character, Manny Heffley. “Why would they want the flag to look like this?” you may ask yourself, the answer: because it makes absolutely no f*cking sense. A lot of the things Gen-Z does is for the sole reason that they can or they want to. As for the National Anthem, this generation of rebellious creatives deigned for the 2010 Wiz Khalifa hit “Black and Yellow”.
Now, obviously neither of these changes were made, but that is not the important part. The value within these actions was that there was actually a petition made through the change.org organization that earned over 1.2 million signatures, along with media coverage across multiple platforms. Something that started as a silly little joke ended up becoming a national phenomena. However, this wasn’t even the biggest TikTok related movement that Gen-Z was behind.
My favorite and by far the most memorable was when Gen-Z fooled, at the time, President-elect Donald Trump. It was in the year 2020, at the end of his first term when someone on TikTok decided it would be funny to book all of the tickets for an Oklahoma Trump rally so that real trump supporters would be unable to attend and to boost the Republican ego. It was even reported through a series of tweets by several of his correspondents that there would be over a million people in attendance. However, there were only around 6,200 tickets scanned into the arena on the actual day of the event.
This is an event I feel will show up in the history books because of the sheer idiocy of it all. A bunch of teenagers on a social media platform that became popular for lip-syncing and “thirst traps” was able to fool the President of the United States at the time, and many other prominent political figures. Overall, I think it was a really funny example of the power of Gen-Z and their relentless ability to come together when they feel really strongly about something.
