In my blog, Foundation Chronicles: How Capitalism and Eurocentric Beauty Standards Uphold One Another, I talked about how the democratizing power of social media pushes to subvert beauty standards. There is surely a glimmer of hope and some of my favorite content creators from back home have pushed for body positivity and have called colorism out. I will be linking some work by some of my favorite young Pakistani creators doing the wonderful work they do.
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However, it is not the full picture of how social media truly is. The truth is, the analysis I made did not fully represent the entirety of social media since social media still predominantly pushes Eurocentric beauty standards, creating insecurities within people and upholding the capitalist industry of skin whitening products.
No matter how much democratizing power social media has, in my part of the world, conventionally attractive individuals with Eurocentric features generally do better on social media. This even applies to people who create comedy or miscellaneous content rather than simply beauty or styling content.
There also exists a culture of bullying and body shaming on social media and the algorithms of social networking sites are usually not regulated enough to take down bullying comments before they reach and affect the victims.
Speaking of algorithms, perhaps the most scandalous aspect of the Tiktok algorithm that substantiates the point this blog post is trying to make is the possibility that the Tiktok algorithm pushes lighter-skinned, conventionally attractive, able-bodied people above everyone else.
Artificial Intelligence researcher Marc Faddoul claimed that Tiktok might have a racial bias in the algorithm where it recommended users creators of similar hair color and skin color to the creators the users had just followed. This means that if the majority of the famous creators are white, creators of color receive limited reach and exposure on the app.
Not only does this prevent creators of color from receiving as many opportunities as white creators, but also increases the visibility of white faces on mobile screens, where young impressionable users could possibly look up to white creators as the beauty standard. All of this has made me question the hope I had about the democratizing power of social media and its subversion of beauty standards because even now, social media perpetuates harmful ideas such as colorism to a large extent.