Lukas Coble

Freshman Lukas Coble was born deaf. Coble relies on lipreading or the use of a phone or paper in order to communicate with hearing people. Despite the challenge of communicating while in masks, deaf and hard of hearing students have faced another challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic: TikTok.  

Tiktok is a video-based social media platform that has seen rapid growth during the first few months of quarantine, growing from 500 million users in December of 2019 to over 2 billion by August of 2020. One trend that emerged during this time was the faking of sign language in videos.

“Sometimes on TikTok, hearing people will fake sign language on their video, and deaf and hard-of-hearing people can not understand what they are saying. It is very annoying to me because they seem to make fun of our deaf culture,” Cobble said.

The TikTok platform has been used as a method of communication and learning for many people over the COVID-19 pandemic. Videos on the app range from dancing to cooking tutorials to videos attempting to spread awareness of global issues. For some, these videos include sign language tutorials. 

“Sometimes hearing people teach sign language to people who want to learn sign language. That makes me frustrated because they don’t want to learn sign language, they really [only] want to learn the sign for fun,” Cobble said. “Most of the time they would ask you to teach them the bad words instead of learning actual sign language.”

TikTok’s platform has faced criticism from users on the app for giving a voice to non-deaf creators who are attempting to teach sign language, rather than to Deaf creators themselves.

“Hearing people can ask deaf or hard of hearing [people] if they want to learn sign language. Sometimes the deaf and hard-of-hearing have a hard time finding a job or participating in a group because [people] refuse to give access to deaf and hard-of-hearing people,” Coble said.