The labour strike is one of the oldest tools workers have. It works the same in a factory as it does online, but workers must be united.
In the summer of 2021, Black creators on TikTok stopped making choreography. The trigger was a new Megan Thee Stallion song called "Thot Shit", which was widely expected to inspire the next viral dance trend. Instead of providing that choreography, Black TikTokers collectively refused. They sat down, wore pajamas, and posted themselves doing nothing. Within a week, the #BlackTikTokStrike hashtag had over two million views, and for the first time, TikTok's enormous non-Black user base got a clear look at what the platform would feel like without the Black creative labour that had been powering it for years.
Despite this being an isolated incident and not inciting real change, it was a good demonstration of the central principle to Marxist labour theory, where workers hold power, and when they stop, value stops with them.
I. A Platform Divided Against Itself
The conditions that produced the Black TikTok Strike are inseparable from the way identity labels are used to fragment workers from one another. TikTok had sorted its creators by race long before the strike, through the "For You" page algorithm, content stealing without credit being the norm, and it's inherent "entrepreneur" culture. Through this, Black creators and White creators performed differently on the platform due to how the TikTok algorithm worked. Due to this, the most viral videos on the platform were from White creators, whereas the choreography for these videos was lifted from Black creators.
TikTok's creator economy is a gig economy. Creators do not own the infrastructure they make money from, have no collective bargaining power, and at the will of TikTok, can be demonetized or removed from the platform entirely. In addition to this, the attention of their audiences are limited, so by nature these gig workers are competing with each other for this limited attention. The Black choreographer whose dance goes viral and the White creator who performs it to a larger audience are both gig workers producing content for a corporation that has structured its payment systems to give them just enough to incentivize them to continue giving their labour to TikTok. Despite their place in the ecosystem being identical, the strike's main purpose was to stop content theft rather than their precarity as gig workers. Whether the strike was on or not, TikTok was still profiting.
"Black TikTok creators turn from humorous utopian imaginings of on-platform equity and celebrations of Blackness and community, to frustrated refusal of on-platform labor and pessimistic reflections on the (im)possibilities for Black content creation." Maris & Monier, 2025, p. 1
The #MelaninMansion trend two years earlier responded to the division between Black and White workers in a different way. It was an imagining of a creative space built by and for Black creators. A space exclusively for marginalized voices is great, however it was still a separate space rather than a challenge to the conditions that made the separate space feel necessary. TikTok's algorithm, ownership, and the theft and lack of compensation of Black creative labour remained untouched.
This is the trap that identity labels set for the working class when they become the whole political horizon. The working class fractures into increasingly specific communities, each advocating for better conditions within their particular tier of the same unjust system. Both Black and White TikTok creators were still using the same unchanged platform that exploited them, whether it was to celebrate their Blackness or to compete for attention. They shared the same class position, however the identity division kept both groups from recognizing this and organizing themselves. The platform depended on that division holding, and it's why the strike happened in the first place, when Black creators stopped accepting it as permanent.
II. The Platform Wants You to Go Viral Alone
TikTok is built around individual visibility. Its entire economic logic runs through an individual creator, which is comprised of their follower count, their engagement rate, and their personal brand. Thus, as a result of being creator focused, the platform does not care about or compensate communities. When your income depends on your personal numbers, the rational response is to maximize those numbers, which means promoting yourself rather than organizing with others in the same position.
This is the individualism that masquerades as liberation on platforms like TikTok. The creator economy presents itself as a space of self-determination where anyone can build an audience. This comes with the illusion of freedom where you can work at your own hours and be your own boss. The downside that is ignored is that this self-determination operates entirely within the terms set by the platform, and that those terms are designed to extract as much creative labour as possible while compensating creators as little as possible. A society that treats people primarily by their identity incentivizes them to promote themselves through that identity rather than organize with others in similar class situations. On TikTok, this meant Black creators were encouraged to build their personal brands as Black creators. Thus, they are competing for an audience that the algorithm was routing towards White creators who appropriated their work.
Jalaiah Harmon's "Renegade" choreography made Charli D'Amelio famous. Harmon remained largely unknown until journalists reported the story. The main focus is that the platform's algorithm does this on purpose, whether D'Amelio gave Harmon credit or not. The platform treats both Black and White creators as different kinds of commodities.
"All bodies are not commodifiable in the same way... non-white and white bodies are mobilized differently... An economy of visibility depends not only on the visible but also on a mechanism of surveillance: who is being watched and seen, and for what reason?" Banet-Weiser, 2018, as cited in Maris & Monier, 2025, p. 4
Climbing within that system by optimizing your metrics and seeking recognition on the platform's own terms is not liberation. It is just assimilation into the structure that exploits labour. The Black TikTok strike simply refuses to participate in this structure. The point of the strike was not to recognize any particular creator's contribution. It withdrew labour collectively, making it impossible to ignore the fact that the system depended on that labour. This is more effective than individuals resisting on their own, as the conversation moves from the individual to the community at large.
III. What Comes After the Strike
In May 2022, TikTok introduced new features for tagging and crediting original creators. The platform moved because it had felt the cost of a collective withdrawal. If the withdrawal had been on an individualistic basis, nothing would have been accomplished. However, due to the collective nature of the withdrawal, TikTok moved because the cost of listening to the strikers and changing was less than just simply doing nothing and losing the strikers' labour.
TikTok's response also gave great next steps to what a collective framework needs to go further. The platform's guidance described proper attribution or the bare minimum as "going above and beyond" rather than a basic expectation. They even advised creators to assume good intent when work was taken without credit. Thus, the structure that enabled this theft remained, and the theft would continue to happen. The message sent to the strikers was that when their labour was stolen and profited off of by someone else, they should just accept it.
"Overall, TikTok's messaging implied proper attribution was more a perk than requirement while also casting demands for credit as uncivil and mean." Maris & Monier, 2025, p. 9
A collective framework that moves beyond individualism has to be able to see this dynamic and actively refuse it. The Black TikTok Strike demonstrated that Black creators were not simply victims of individual bad actors who forgot to credit them. They were a class of workers whose labour was being systematically extracted by a platform and a community that benefited from keeping that extraction invisible. Framing it as a structural condition rather than a series of personal slights is required before any action can be taken to change this. Recognizing this becomes possible when the people affected understand their shared conditions clearly enough to act on them together rather than navigating them alone.
The strike did not end the conditions that produced it. But it established that collective action on digital platforms is possible, that it works by the same logic as collective action everywhere else, and that the identity categories used to divide workers from each other are not the same as the communities those workers actually belong to. In order for any meaningful action to come out of this in any way, workers must continue to organize and make demands, given that they are the ones in control of labour.