TikTok will launch a new dedicated science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) feed in a move which creators hope will “inspire” young people to “project themselves into different careers”.
The feed, exclusively featuring videos exploring Stem topics, will be available to the social media platform’s users in the UK and Ireland alongside the For You page from Tuesday.
According to TikTok, almost 15 million Stem-related videos have been published globally in the last three years, with some creators gaining large followings from users who are interested in pursuing careers in the industry or finding out more information.
The new addition is aimed at encouraging young people to explore Stem subjects and access fun and educational videos from experts studying or working in the field.
“The launch of the Stem feed is really exciting and being able to reach people with the science we do at Cern is fantastic,” Dr Nellist, who is from Coventry and now splits her time between Amsterdam and Geneva, told the PA news agency.
“Personally, I want us to be able to reach people who haven’t been exposed to it before and the Stem feed will mean that people who perhaps didn’t think that science was for them might see some videos, see the jokes, see the content being accessible for them, and have a change a heart.
As well as creating videos using popular music or trends to get her audience to engage with her science-related content, Dr Nellist, who goes by the name Particle Clara on the platform, launches TikTok live streams from the Cern site.
“It’s really fantastic that I can get my phone out and wander around the site, I go 100 metres underground to our experiment and launch a TikTok Live and there are hundreds of people there with me,” she said.
Eleonora Svanberg, 24, a PhD student studying theoretical physics at Oxford University, has dedicated her TikTok platform to “inspire” young people to look further into Stem-related subjects and to act as a “role model” for women in the field.
“For me, (the Stem feed) means a lot, not only will my passion for Stem reach a wider audience, we’ll also be able to present more diverse people doing Stem and hopefully reach more people that could see themselves doing Stem,” Miss Svanberg, from Sweden and living in Oxford, told the PA news agency.
Miss Svanberg, who has more than 136,000 followers on TikTok, said she uses her platform to create fun and trendy videos to be “relatable” and “transparent” and to show her audience that Stem subjects are “accessible”.
“I don’t think Stem should be viewed as something elitist or something that is unreachable, we should all welcome everyone with open arms.
“I get daily messages from young girls around the world saying that I’ve inspired them to pursue Stem and that means the world to me.”
The feed will also include English-speaking content with auto-translate subtitles which will be fact-checked by two independent organisations.
It will be expanded across Europe in the coming weeks following the launch of the feed in the United States, which has seen a third of teenagers visiting the page on a weekly basis, according to TikTok.