Young Australians on social media are mocking Scott Morrison and expressing their anger over his six-day holiday to Hawaii during Australia’s bushfire crisis.
Morrison returned to work on Sunday, cutting his personal family holiday short by a day, after transferring responsibilities to the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, last Monday. On Friday, the prime minister announced he would return early after the deaths of two firefighters, and said he “deeply regrets any offence caused” by the holiday.
But his absence, and his lack of action on climate change, had already become a meme on Facebook, satirical news websites and TikTok, the video app popular among teenagers and younger users.
TikToks are short videos, between 15 and 60 seconds, where users lipsync along to film dialogue or music.
One, set to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, has been viewed more than 120,000 times while Morrison was overseas. Another, set to Kourtney Kardashian saying “Working is not my top priority”, has racked up more than 42,000 views.
The #scomo hashtag, which collects many of the videos, had more than 1 million combined views by Monday.
Another, set to the 2006 song Cry for You by Swedish singer September, received 217,100 views and 37,100 likes and prominently samples a segment where she sings: “You’ll never see me again”.
Young Australians also protested against Morrison’s absence, on Thursday and Saturday last week in marches outside Kirribilli House.
Hundreds set up tents outside the prime minister’s Sydney residence on Thursday, while 13-year-old Isolde Raj-Seppings was given a move-on direction by police.
Instead of showing up with a message for Scomo, this kid decided it would be more effective to send a message to Peter Dutton pic.twitter.com/021BtMnhDD
— sam langford (@_slangers) December 18, 2019
After launching in 2017, TikTok has grown to become one of the most downloaded apps of 2019. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, it bought and adopted the popular lip-sync app Musical.ly, giving it an instant existing audience base of 60 million users.
It has also recently come under fire for blocking posts critical of the Chinese government, including a viral make-up tutorial that drew attention to the government’s mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang.
A spokesman for the company said it was a “human moderation error” and reinstated the account of the user, 17-year-old Feroza Aziz.
In September, the Guardian revealed TikTok’s internal guidelines told moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square or Tibetan independence.
TikTok operates as a separate but identical app called Douyin in China that complies with Chinese censorship laws.
