In 2020, Black TikTok users Jalaiah Harmon and Keara Wilson created dances for K Camp’s “Renegade” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage Remix” that went viral. However, after Megan Thee Stallion’s recent release of “Thot S---”, many Black creators on the app have said that they are not going to create a dance for this song as a way to protest Black creators not receiving proper credit and compensation for their work. This is at least the second time that Black TikTok users have held a strike against the platform.

Even though it was Jalaiah Harmon and Keara Wilson who created the dances, it was White social media celebrities like Addison Rae who took these dances to places like Jimmy Fallon’s show and Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

“African American youth have always been early adopters of different social platforms, if it's Twitter, if it was Instagram. Certainly Snapchat, TikTok, Vine," said S. Craig Watkins, director of the Institute for Media Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. "A whole sort of long laundry list of platforms that Black users were some of the earliest adopters, some of the most inventive content creators, and yet have never been really adequately recognized or compensated for what they bring to those platforms.”

In May 2020 there was a Blackout on TikTok, which was protesting censorship and other issues. In response to this, TikTok said it would create an incubator for Black creators and created a fund for Black creativity. On YouTube, they made a fund called the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund. However, some people are saying this is not enough.

“Let's stop celebrating creator funds, incremental creator features, and shallow rhetoric about creator empowerment. All of these will fail to solve creators' economic precarity, so long as we fail to fix the fundamental issue, which is OWNERSHIP,” tweeted Li Jin, managing partner at Atelier, an early-stage Venture Capital firm.

Jin continues, saying, “Without ownership, creators are ultimately enriching and empowering *someone else* — platform owners — with their work. The value they create is fed back into a system that commoditizes and treats creators as disposable labor.”

However, the influencer profession is relatively new, so there has not been a lot of regulation on how people are compensated for their work or how these creators are given credit for their work.

“There are people who are having these conversations around digital labor, around how do you restructure the power dynamics between those who create content versus the platforms who benefit from that content. I still think we’re still in the early, early days of all of this,” Watkins said.

Raven Maragh-Lloyd, an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis., says that TikTok’s platform of copying trends and sharing them without giving credit to who created it makes it easier for appropriation to happen.

“TikTok is a new kind of player in that it was specifically built, I would argue, to copy and share content without credit to the original author,” Maragh-Lloyd said. “The whole point of TikTok is to copy.” She goes on to say “I think TikTok is in strange waters when it comes to appropriation.”

Amanda Bennett, a co-founder of the consultancy firm define&empower, made a viral video explaining the strike. “Black creators are tired of white people profiting off our work and appropriating Black culture,” she said. “We’ve seen the way older generations of Black creators have been disrespected and erased, and we aren’t having it any more.”

Some Black creators have made videos to “Thot S---“, but not enough to start a trend. Videos with white creators are mainly mouthing the words or flailing.

“For all my melanated brothers and sisters of the African diaspora, we are on strike, we are not making a dance for Thot S---, we are just going to let them keep flailing,” said the user capnkenknuckles in a video. “It just shows how much you need us to make a dance.”