Palestinians have long been using social media as a tool for activism. Each platform provides unique socio-technological affordances that shape users’ communicative practices as networked publics. Focusing on the video-sharing platform TikTok, which has taken a “serious turn” in recent years, this article examines how Palestinian users performed playful acts of resistance during the escalation of violence between Palestinians and Israelis in May 2021. Applying a multimodal analysis to 500 TikTok videos posted during the conflict under #gazaunderattack, we identify three memetic templates (#challenge)—(1) lip-syncing, (2) duets, and (3) point-of-view—that unfold the ways TikTok’s design and its play-based affordances ignite affective streams of audiovisual content that render playful activism in times of conflict. Driven by TikTok’s culture of imitation and competition, playful activism enables the participation of ordinary users in political emerging events with the help of looping meme videos composed of collaborative, dialogic, and communal socio-technical functions. Playful activism transforms users’ ritualized performances into powerful political instruments on TikTok and makes democratic participation more relatable, tangible, and accessible to various audiences.

In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a primarily entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format that we describe as “serious TikTok.” In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to playfully unpack complex topics, contextualize and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained particular attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s memetic vernaculars to produce more stimulating historical storytelling formats.

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TikTok is no longer the short-video platform for “silly dances.” Its transition from entertainment to an interest-based platform increased the visual volume of topics like the Holocaust, especially during August 2020, when a controversial meme-trend emerged under the popular hashtag #POVHolocaustChallenge. In this challenge, TikTokers were encouraged to participate in a point-of-view (POV) performance in which they reenacted fictionalized memories of Holocaust victims. This study draws attention to the unique nature of the #POVchallenge form on TikTok as a series of fictional memes that mediate users’ self-reflections on various social, political, and historical issues. By applying a multimodal analysis to 250 videos from the #POVHolocaustChallenge, we illuminate three imaginative and memetically reoccurring narratives in users’ (re)mediations of memories using POV aesthetics that we name mem(e)ories. (1) Testimonial - TikTokers posing as dead Holocaust victims, testifying from heaven after being murdered by Nazis. (2) Punitive - TikTokers playing prisoners in the present (2020) being sent back to tragic events as punishment for their crimes. (3) Escapist - TikTokers time traveling while merging 1940 with 2020 in a complex temporal interplay. Based also on interviews with fifteen TikTokers who participated in the challenges and five representatives of Holocaust-related institutions, we claim that the #POVHolocaustChallenge enables users’ (re)mediation of knowledge on past events and facilitates personal connections to the memory of the Holocaust via video-memes. The affective influence of multimodal memes on TikTok can spark conversation, interpretation, and reflection among youth while inviting the inscription of Holocaust memory into their (social media) lives.

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