TikTok Is Your Religion. You Just Haven't Realised It Yet.

Eda Dolunay

6 minutes ago

7 min read

Last week, I went on a trip. And somewhere between photographing the places I was visiting and watching everyone else do the same, I realized how exhausted I had become from being constantly visible online. The more I stepped away from social media, the less I wanted to return to it. What surprised me was that leaving it behind did not feel like simply putting down an app. It felt like stepping outside of a culture.

With some distance, I began to notice how deeply the internet had entered the way we experience the world: how we speak, what we find funny, what we consider beautiful, where we want to go, what we want to buy, and even what we believe is worth experiencing. Social media no longer feels like a place where we simply consume culture; it increasingly feels like a place where culture is taught, reproduced, and shared. What if the algorithm isn't just shaping what we see, but shaping the culture we see the world through?

The day I started thinking about this, I was walking around a bookstore abroad when I noticed that the busiest section was the TikTok Books stand. Later, in a cosmetics store, I found the same phenomenon: everyone seemed to be heading toward the “Hot on Social Media” section. A bookstore no longer had to tell people which books were worth reading. A cosmetics store no longer had to decide which products deserved attention. “Popular online” had become a category of its own.

When an internet trend becomes a physical shelf, a product category, or even a reason to visit a place, the boundary between media and culture starts to disappear.

I met a girl there who told me that her English was not very good. We struggled to communicate, but somehow, we understood each other perfectly in another language: the language of the internet. When she got excited about something, she would say “clock it” or “slay.” Then, when she said “very demure, very mindful,” I realized something: how is it possible that we can struggle to speak each other’s languages while effortlessly understanding the same internet language?

Her English was not enough for us to communicate easily, but social media had given her a vocabulary that crossed geographical and linguistic boundaries. We did not share a native language, but we shared references. We understood the same jokes, recognized the same expressions, and knew what certain words were supposed to communicate without having to explain them.

Millions of people who do not share a native language are nevertheless learning the same expressions, references, jokes, and cultural codes. At some point, internet slang stops being just slang. It becomes a language of its own.

Then my friend, who was showing me around the city, asked me something that stayed with me: “Do you want to see the part of the city that social media made famous, or do you want to see it like a local?”

At first, it sounded like a simple question. But the distinction stayed with me. The city had existed long before TikTok or Instagram, yet social media had created another version of it: a collection of places made famous not necessarily by their history or local significance, but by how often they were filmed, posted, shared, and revisited. There was the city itself, and then there was the city as seen through the internet.

Social media was not just giving us a language to describe the world. It was beginning to shape the world we considered worth seeing.

That was when I started to wonder whether social media had become something much bigger than a platform. What if social media first became a language, then became a culture, and is now beginning to resemble a religion?

What makes a language a language is not simply vocabulary. It is the shared world of meaning behind the words. To understand an expression, you need to understand its references, humor, context, social rules, and everything it communicates beyond its literal definition. If someone says “slay,” knowing the dictionary meaning is not enough. You need to know when to use it, what tone it carries, where it comes from, and even what kind of person you become when you use it.

Social media does not just teach us these words. It teaches us the cultural codes attached to them. And those codes help us recognize one another. Knowing an expression can signal that someone has seen the same videos, understood the same jokes, and belongs to the same cultural moment. A word becomes a password: I know what you know.

“Demure” is a perfect example. The word existed long before social media, but the internet transformed it into a global cultural reference. People did not simply learn its definition. They learned an aesthetic, a way of behaving, a sense of humor, a persona, and a particular way of presenting themselves.

A word became an aesthetic. An aesthetic became a behavior. A behavior became a persona. People were no longer simply using the word; they were participating in everything it had come to represent.

This is where language begins to become culture. Once millions of people share not only a vocabulary but the same references, aesthetics, social cues, and ideas about what is desirable or embarrassing, they are no longer simply speaking the same language. They are learning some of the same rules for seeing the world.

I met another girl who, while talking to me about religion, told me that she had started practicing certain rituals that were not part of her own religion simply because she had seen them on TikTok.

A ritual that once belonged to a particular religion, community, or tradition can now appear on a screen in front of someone with no cultural connection to it. It can be watched, copied, repeated, and eventually incorporated into someone's life. Culture no longer has to be inherited to be adopted.

And social media has its own rituals, too. We repeat formats, recreate aesthetics, use the same expressions, repost the same ideas, and participate in trends. Sometimes it is simply entertainment. But often, participation is also a way of signaling that we belong.

Repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity creates belonging. Eventually, belonging becomes part of identity. Something that began as a thirty-second video can become part of how a group behaves.

This is where I started thinking about religion.

There is something fundamental connecting religion, language, culture, and social media: meaning-making—the way we collectively decide what matters and what something means.

Religion has historically given people shared systems for understanding the world. It creates symbols, stories, rituals, moral boundaries, communities, and shared vocabularies. It tells us what matters, what is sacred, what is acceptable, what is forbidden, and what gives life meaning.

Culture and language do some of this work too. And increasingly, so does social media.

It creates shared references, symbols, rituals, communities, and ideas about what is desirable or embarrassing, acceptable or “cringe,” worth noticing or worth ignoring. It even creates its own forms of moral judgment.

Think about how quickly we label someone online: “problematic,” “iconic,” “cringe,” “authentic,” “toxic,” “goals.” These words do more than describe people. They place them within a shared moral and cultural system, telling us how we are supposed to interpret them.

Perhaps this is where social media stops looking like a platform altogether. What if it has become a cultural system? But culture does not spread on its own. Someone, or something, determines which ideas travel, which meanings become shared, and which references remain at the margins.

Today, that something is increasingly the algorithm.

Culture used to spread through families, communities, geography, religion, schools, art, music, television, and institutions. Now an algorithm can take a word, a joke, an aesthetic, a ritual, or an idea and place it in front of millions of people who would otherwise never encounter it.

The algorithm does not necessarily invent meaning. It determines, in part, what gets repeated. And repetition matters. The more we encounter something, the more familiar it becomes. The more familiar it becomes, the more normal it feels. Eventually, what feels normal can begin to feel natural, inevitable, or even true. What if the algorithm does not need to tell us what to believe? What if it only needs to decide what we see often enough?

This is what makes algorithmic culture so powerful. The algorithm can participate in producing culture without ever declaring itself a cultural authority. It does not have to tell us what is beautiful if it can repeatedly show us what everyone else appears to find beautiful. It does not have to tell us what matters if it can make certain things impossible to ignore.

Could visibility itself have become a form of cultural power?

When a word becomes a shared reference, an aesthetic becomes desirable, a place becomes a tourist attraction, or a behavior begins to feel normal, the algorithm is doing more than reflecting culture. It is helping determine which ideas and practices gain enough collective attention to shape it.

And that brings me back to the original question.

When did social media stop being something we use and start becoming something we participate in?

Perhaps it happened when social media stopped being merely a place where we shared culture and became a place where we produced it.

First, social media became a language. Then that language became culture. And when that culture began creating shared rituals, symbols, identities, moral boundaries, communities, and ideas about what matters, it began to resemble religion - not necessarily in belief, but in function.

Maybe social media is not a new religion. But what if the comparison was never really about worship? What if it was about meaning?

What if the most powerful systems in our lives are not necessarily the ones we consciously believe in, but the ones that quietly teach us what matters?

What to read.

What to buy.

What to wear.

What to say.

What to desire.

What to laugh at.

What to reject.

What to repeat.

What to become.

And if social media increasingly participates in shaping all of these things, how much of our sense of what matters is still independent of it?

Perhaps the algorithm is not the new god because we worship it. Perhaps it is because it has become part of the system through which we determine what is valuable, desirable, normal, and meaningful.

And if an algorithm can shape the language through which we describe the world, influence the values through which we judge it, and help define the desires through which we navigate it, then perhaps the question is no longer whether social media has become a religion.

Perhaps the question is whether we can recognize its influence while we are still living inside it. If the algorithm shapes the language through which we understand the world, is our language still ours?