On Nov. 11, 2022, Kendy Auguste published the TikTok video that divided his life in two.
Before he hit “post” that morning, the Haitian English teacher based in Cap-Haïtien had about 5,000 TikTok followers, for whom he recorded quirky videos of himself rapping French phrases and their English translations.
“Ce n’est pas moi,” he sang in this day’s video, a jaunty electronic beat playing behind him. “It’s not me!”
Why We Wrote This
Social media can democratize knowledge. But when they reward influencers differently, depending on where the individuals come from, they perpetuate perceptions that ideas from some parts of the world are worth more than those from other regions.
But by some algorithmic twist of fate, that particular 10-second clip caught fire. It surged past Mr. Auguste’s normal audience, quickly racking up millions of views from delighted strangers around the world. “I’m trying to sleep, but this is stuck in my head,” one commenter wrote. “Me after eating someone else’s donut in the work cafeteria,” joked another.
Then, the earworm English lesson broke the bounds of TikTok entirely. DJs sampled “Ce n’est pas moi” in club sets. A French comedian invited Mr. Auguste to Paris to do a live show.
“That was the moment where everything began,” Mr. Auguste says.
His viral success was, in some regards, a classic tale of how social media can dissolve borders and democratize fame. Here was an English teacher, who had never left the Caribbean island where he was born, amassing an adoring global public using nothing but a cheap smartphone.
But it is also a reminder of the limits of that fame. Algorithms can bless users like Mr. Auguste with a viral video, but they are mercurial, just as often passing over a similar clip.
What’s more, Mr. Auguste has about 2.7 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, but he doesn’t make any money on either site. Although both sites have “creator funds” that pay royalties to popular accounts, or influencers, these are only accessible to users in a few, mostly Western, countries.
“One thing we love about social media is how it democratizes knowledge, and gives different people … a platform to share what they know,” says Stephen Mutie, a literature lecturer at Kenyatta University in Kenya who studies social media use and some of the benefits in developing countries.
But when only some people get paid for that work, he says it can end up reinforcing the opposite idea: that some people’s knowledge matters more than others.
The haves and have-nots of social media?
After Mr. Auguste’s video went viral, he watched his follower count on TikTok and Instagram soar. One of those new fans was Bassam Hamadi, a French comedian and actor.
For Mr. Hamadi, learning English had been a persistently embarrassing task. He “didn’t dare” speak it outside a classroom for many years, he says, because his French accent made him feel cartoonish. “Good” English, for him, was the private school cadence of the BBC presenters his father listened to every evening on the radio – formal and seemingly impossible to achieve.
On the other hand, Mr. Auguste’s videos embraced the profound silliness of trying to express yourself in a language you speak imperfectly.
“I don’t need chocolate,” he rapped in one video. “I need money!”
“In France we’re snobby about our English, but we’re also afraid to speak it,” Mr. Hamadi says. Maybe what everyone needed, he thought, was to just let themselves act a bit more ridicule.
So he slid into Mr. Auguste’s DMs with an offer: Come to France. “I wanted him to have that human connection with his followers and share his love of languages,” he says.
A few months later, in March 2023, Mr. Auguste was on stage at a Parisian nightclub, rapping his lesson about negation to a real-life crowd.
For a month, Mr. Auguste and his cousin, with whom he runs his language school, toured France, giving live versions of their TikTok lessons in classrooms, town halls, and clubs. They went ice skating and visited the Eiffel Tower. Giggling fans approached them in the street and in shopping malls, asking for autographs and selfies. “I was surprised at how many people knew me,” Mr. Auguste says.
Back at home, Mr. Auguste’s online fame also started attracting more students to his English school, which had gone mostly online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You can see he doesn’t teach for the money – he teaches because he wants to share something,” says Jordan Ngonzo Windra, a railway engineer from the Central African Republic who began taking weekly lessons with Mr. Auguste after seeing one of his videos on Instagram.
But if social media brought in new students from around the world, it was also becoming a massive time commitment. Mr. Auguste now essentially worked two parallel jobs – running his school all day, and then when he was done, creating new social media videos for his fans, which took hours to shoot and edit.
At the same time, Mr. Auguste watched as popular accounts in France remixed his audio or spoofed his videos, racking up views that he knew were earning them money. Because his account was registered in Haiti, where users couldn’t be paid, his own videos were valued at nothing.
TikTok and Instagram have not made public how they decide which countries’ users are eligible for payment, and neither platform responded to questions for this article. TikTok was temporarily banned in the U.S. in January, but is back online following an executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump later that month.
The reasons these platforms only pay in certain countries may be at least partially practical, Dr. Mutie says. For instance, certain countries’ laws or financial systems may make payment processes more complex for international companies.
But he fears the consequences of dividing social media into haves and have-nots.
In many parts of the world, he says, social media have driven offline social change, helping people expose injustices, organize demonstrations, and share opinions freely. “Instead of restricting and shrinking the space for people to interact with these platforms, we should be looking for ways to expand it,” he says. “And one way to do that is to pay people.”
For Mr. Auguste, being able to make money from his accounts would be life-changing.
He sometimes thinks back to his early days learning English. He was a teenager in a coastal city where cruise ships frequently disgorged groups of chattering, sunburnt American tourists. English speakers also arrived as volunteers, flocking in their matching T-shirts to local hospitals and orphanages.
Mr. Auguste wanted to know these visitors better, so he learned their language. “I loved breaking that barrier,” he says.
Suddenly, the world felt smaller, and bigger at the same time.
