Cause You’re Hot, Then You’re Cold

Yes, these are the lyrics to Katy Perry’s hit song “Hot N Cold,” but also an accurate description of what has taken over my social media feeds. 

Scroll.

Crave and HBO Max’s hit show Heated Rivalry has been renewed for a second season.

Scroll.

An ICE agent detains a 19-year-old nursing student after a cop noticed an “accent.”

Scroll.

Heated Rivalry inspires a real-life hockey player to come out publicly.

Scroll.

On his way home from school, a five-year-old boy is detained by ICE in Minneapolis.

_

Unfortunately, like many others, doomscrolling has been a habit of mine for quite some time now. It used to be a way to escape, a nighttime routine to relieve stress. Now it has become one of the main drivers of stress in my life. The saturation of my social media feed, especially my TikTok For You Page and, according to my friends, theirs too, has turned into an infinite loop of videos similar to the ones mentioned above. 

Not just one of the main drivers of stress, Tiktok has also become the primary source where I  discover these headlines. Finding out a show has been renewed is amazing news. But then discovering that a student, Caroline Dias Goncalves, who is the same age as me, has been taken away because of the way she speaks, induces the complete opposite feeling. Going from seeing a gut-wrenching edit from HBO’s hit show set to the song “Matilda” by Harry Styles, and then a second later seeing someone in Minnesota being beaten to the ground by ICE agents has become a normal part of the scroll. That emotional whiplash is the reality.

The constant back-and-forth between the variety of topics feels like mood swings. Going from seeing memes to White House briefings, to get-ready-with-me’s, to discovering that someone your university is associated with is in the Epstein files. The videos we consume are fed to us in such a jumbled-up way that it becomes difficult to process the emotions we associate with them.  

One of those emotions is fear. Fear is an awful thing, and now more than ever, it can be felt in the videos we watch, in the shows we watch, in the places we step into, in the conversations we have, in the songs we listen to, in the books we read, and in the people we interact with. But sometimes, even if not equally, there is hope seen in those same things. 

Clearly, TikTok is good at blurring the lines between fiction and reality with its algorithm. But even more than that, like most social media platforms, it's good at mobilizing communities. I am not going to pretend that the pros outweigh the cons, because they don’t, and then I would be lying. But just because there are so many cons does not mean there are no benefits at all. 

For every fifty videos I see of ICE agents taking someone away, I see at least one of people standing up for each other. For example, a group of New Yorkers came together to force ICE to call off a raid in Manhattan. Or, seeing Jesse Kortuem, an Ice Hockey player, come out via an Instagram post after watching Heated Rivalry and receiving thousands and thousands of supportive comments, as well as a message from Hudson Williams, one of the show’s main characters.

Links to GoFundMe pages, petition sign-ups, boycotts, and awareness campaigns are other examples of how the power of online communities is evident. From raising money for immigrant families to sharing flyers to publicize the story of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who was detained by ICE, people continue to show up and show out. 

Personally, I’ve seen the impact of bridging social media and bringing communities together in real time. My friend and I attended the Club 90s Heated Rivalry Rave at Webster Hall after learning about it on TikTok. We expected to see the popular edits, hear the show's soundtrack, and dance the night away. What we didn’t expect was the D.J. (@zoobiana) in the middle of her set, projecting “FUCK ICE” on the screen while using her platform to speak up about how incongruous it was that, here we were, all having fun, while the political state of the nation outside Webster Hall was far from that.

So, we did see the popular edits, hear the soundtrack, and dance the night away. But for a moment, we also realized that, even if nowhere else, in that moment we were part of a community—not just one that watched and appreciated the same show, but one that shared the same moral compass—a community one way or another brought together through social media.

All in all, social media platforms like TikTok are tools. And tools can be good or bad. It just depends on how we use them. Clearly, by some people, it is weaponized, it is used to induce fear, hatred, and violence, but that’s not all that exists in this world. As the billboard during Bad Bunny’s halftime show read, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Love shows up in videos celebrating different cultures, in watching and rejoicing for those who may not look like us but bleed the same, or in simply sending your friend a clip that reminds you of them. Use social media for good. Use it to raise awareness. Use it so YOU control the algorithm, rather than it controlling you.