HILLMANTOK university:the future of Social Media (& America)

Jan 28

HillmanTok University is the future of social media. The way that it fuses solutions to problems in real life, with community, with opportunities for monetization cannot be overstated.

This is a watershed moment for social media.

This month has been apocalyptic for social media as we knew it. The founder of Meta, simply to get a seat at the cool kids' table, not only eliminated fact-checking and adherence to fact-checking standards from their platforms, but he went on a podcast and said that the only reason why correct information was disseminated about the COVID-19 virus was that they were basically bullied into sharing science by the government.

The 10 latest changes on Instagram could at best be described as Kafka-esque, because they make no sense and they're making everyone from social media experts to small business owners just rack their brains for how they're going to continue on the platform.

I don't know what's happening at Twitter/X because in the 24 hours after Elon Musk bought the platform, however many years ago, hate speech went up 500%, and my agency stopped working there altogether.But I do know what Elon Musk did last week, and so do you.

TikTok went out for just long enough for the majority of Americans to receive not one, but two, statements that aligned our president with some kind of supreme leader and savior.

A lot of us have been waiting and watching and wondering what the future of social media is.

Then, the Black academics entered the chat. To my understanding, it began with Dr. Barlow, who came on TikTok to create a TikTok for the 35 students in her Intro to African American Studies class.

That video went viral.

What happened since is that a slew of Black academics and thought leaders, professionals, and professors have created syllabi for graduate and postgraduate level courses.

The most impactful moments in media and social media address a real need in real-time.

President Trump's rollback of DEI initiatives in education is so severe right now that the Air Force is not allowed to teach the history of the Tuskegee Airmen or women pilots. So there is a threat to education and access to truth and information. Concurrently, the cost of a college education or postgraduate education is astronomical. These professors are under threat of the opportunity that their programs could be cut, their books could be banned. What they could or could not teach might depend on where they're teaching.

The teachers showed up. And the students followed suit, created viral videos about acceptance and the classes they were enrolled in.

HILLMANToK UNIVERSITY solves multiple problems at onCe

What's incredible about HillTok University and about all these professors creating these courses online on TikTok is:

Access to information that was otherwise being banned.
Free higher education for students.
Monetization: Every time one of these videos goes viral, and the creators get more than 10,000 followers, and they make a video over a minute, they have the opportunity to monetize.
Community: This trend showcases how community drives virality. The teachers create content; the students create trends around consuming the content; the original content gains more traction and visibility providing visibility and monetization for future content creation.

This trend is simultaneously addressing a failure of government, a lack of access to information; and it is funding the effort itself. It's extraordinary.

This is a trend that leverages the key benefits of social media platforms—namely reach and monetization—to foster three fundamental pieces of resistance: access to information, funding, and community.

In a month where social media has given us confusion, fear, anti-intellectualism, and propaganda; to see community, academia, and historically-excluded leaders thrive: This is the trend we needed.