As the United States Federal Government deliberates on banning TikTok in the name of red-scare fear-mongering over China, an upsetting and mind-boggling pattern of exploitation has emerged on the app. Syrian refugees, displaced by more than a decade of civil war, have begun to appear on TikTok live streams in the last two years to beg for money from viewers, often streaming for hours and pushed to humiliate themselves for donations — of which they pocket only a small portion. Investigations from both the BBC and the Al-Monitor have found cases of online begging in refugee camps in Northwestern Syria and Lebanon.
These stories are nothing short of sickening. They are yet another indictment of our world’s institutions; a hellish cocktail of dystopian social media exploitation, economic inequality and human suffering. This “TikTok refugee industrial complex,” betrays our institutions’ sacrificial slaughter of justice at the altar of an all-consuming lust for profit. If there is any “silver lining” to be drawn, it is that in the past many of these people would have simply died in the dark. At least now they have an audience of disempowered and horrified onlookers.
In October 2022, the BBC reported that refugees in northwestern Syria were streaming for hours, begging for donations. The refugees were given phones and other streaming equipment by middlemen connected to international “live agencies,” which would take a cut of whatever the families made in donations. After banking fees and the large additional slice taken by TikTok, refugees were reportedly left with less than 20% of any given donation. TikTok told the BBC that live streams soliciting money are against their terms of service, but despite this, the corporation continues to profit. This practice is not limited to this particular area, either, and is also taking place in displaced persons camps in northern Lebanon, according to a report from the Al-Monitor.
Of course, these people are not at fault for turning to what may be the only way for them to make a living and care for their families. U.S. and EU sanctions make direct transfers of money into Syria extremely difficult, which means platforms like TikTok are sometimes the only easy way for people sympathetic to the refugees’ plight to send aid. The fact that this is the only way for many people in refugee camps to survive is indicative of the utter failure of global institutions to care for the oppressed.
Instead of working towards an end to the violence, the international community, especially the United States and Russia, has dumped billions of dollars of weapons and thousands of troops into Syria. Meanwhile, neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon, kept in a state of perpetual poverty under global American economic hegemony, shoulder the vast burden of the refugee crisis. At the same time, Western Europe and the U.S., the two wealthiest societies in human history, adopt increasingly xenophobic rhetoric and policies, including the current American obsession with Chinese infiltration, of which TikTok is a major dimension.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to draw a coherent solution to this problem. In a just world, there would be no refugees forced to live in squalor and turn to exploitative social media companies to survive, but it isn’t clear if banning these live streams would improve the lives of these people. They could lose an important source of income, and the root cause of their suffering, their refugee status, would remain unsolved. TikTok should obviously cease to profit from desperate refugees, but getting a major international corporation to choose morality over profit is a Sisyphean task.
It’s easy to point out the macrocosmic roots of this story. Capitalism, imperialism, racism — the usual suspects. But broadly blaming these systems, while not incorrect, is unsatisfying and fails to offer an immediate solution. None of the above systems of power can or will be dismantled overnight, even if their dissolution remains a valiant goal. Honestly, my hope that we’ll ever fix the institutional rot at the heart of humanity seems to dissipate with each new story about the ongoing annihilation of Gaza, failures to meet climate goals or the rising tide of fascism. In theory, I suppose the situation could be worse. At least there is some money making its way to these people. But accepting that is grim consolation at best and a vile admission of failure at worst.
If there is any even partially optimistic angle to be gleaned from this, it is how social media networks bring attention to suffering that might otherwise be ignored, even if those same networks are leading to new forms of exploitation. Information about war and poverty are now diffused around the world in an instant, making the false consciousness of the alleged peace of the liberal international order increasingly difficult to maintain. In spite of my pessimism about the indefatigability of humanity’s current status quo, we live in an age of incredible connectivity and have unprecedented ability to build new relationships and political coalitions.
This should not be misconstrued as a defense of TikTok or any other social media company. TikTok is a rent-seeking, profit-driven entity that will continue to act with deliberate ill intent in order to reinforce its bottom line. Rather, the underlying infrastructure upon which social media is built presents the potentiality of a great democratization of information and communication, even if such a dream is far from being realized. Syrians in Idlib, Tripoli and elsewhere are taking whatever husk of hope exists now to grasp some tiny sliver of visibility. That should not go unnoticed.