What is TikTok’s impact on migration in West Africa?
Follow is a journey from West Africa in pursuit of the Western dream — whether in Europe or America. It moves between reality and fiction, illusions and disillusions, dreams and nightmares.
The word follow is not just a term borrowed from social media; it speaks to a wider social trend. If most of my friends have left, why wouldn’t I start thinking about it too?
Today, two major routes define migration from West Africa: one crosses the Atlantic Ocean towards Spain’s Canary Islands; the other takes migrants by air to the Americas, with the United States as the final destination. Follow traces both of these paths, capturing aspirations that often fade into disillusionment and a daily struggle to preserve dignity.
In this context, TikTok plays a central role. For many young people, the platform acts as both a window and a mirror, projecting a dream of the West while reflecting the hopes of those still at home. Videos shared from Europe or the United States often depict lives filled with comfort, style, and freedom. Carefully curated clips of shopping centres, fashionable outfits, and seemingly effortless success create a seductive and selective vision of what it means to “make it”.
This digital storytelling fuels not only longing, but also social pressure. When friends or relatives post about their new lives abroad, staying behind can feel like failure. Migration becomes not only a personal ambition, but a social expectation, almost a necessity to avoid falling behind.
At the same time, TikTok has become an informal hub of information. Some use it to share advice, contacts, or possible routes. Yet much remains hidden behind the screen: the dangers of the journey, the uncertainty on arrival, and the loneliness that often follows. TikTok’s structure, driven by visibility, trends, and performance, encourages users to share their best moments, not their hardest ones. As a result, many young people make life-changing decisions based on filtered fragments of reality.
A young influencer with 365,000 TikTok followers sets up to film a video for his account in Rosso, southern Mauritania, on November 29, 2024.
According to a study by GeoPoll, TikTok has become the second most used social media platform in sub-Saharan Africa, after Facebook, with a significant active usage rate of 60%. In the Rosso region, all teenagers have a TikTok account, while adults either reject what they call a “bottomless pit”.
An employee at a rice factory in Daoudmourad, a village in the south of Mauritania, stands in the doorway and watches his shadow stretch across the ground, on November 28, 2024.
In 2024, Mauritania has become a key departure point for migrants attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands via the perilous Atlantic migration route and United States through central America. With the growing number of people taking this path, it is expected to become the main gateway for African migrants in the coming years.
A young Malian points westward from the beach in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, on December 8, 2024.
According to Caminando Fronteras, the main NGO monitoring the Atlantic migration route between Africa and Europe, 9,757 people died or went missing in 2024 while attempting to reach Spain via this route. The UN migration agency, IOM, reports 1,000 deaths at sea based on its database but acknowledges a severe lack of sources.
Shoes left behind in a pirogue recently arrived in Gran Canaria, on January 15, 2025.
Upon arrival, Spanish sea rescuers ask migrants to hand over all belongings for hygiene reasons and provide new clothes. Many items are left in the boat. A new T-shirt, sunglasses, or branded shoes become the first way to show the arrival and success on social media.
Daouda Diop, a Senegalese former fisherman, who became a model in the Canary Islands poses in his apartment in Las Palmas, on January 12, 2025.
When he’s not working on a construction site, Daouda carefully styles his outfit, always dressed in elegant, second-hand clothes found in the outlet shops of Las Palmas. He never leaves home without posting on TikTok. “People shouldn’t stop at my photos just because they look cool. You can be beautiful and still be poor. They look my videos on TikTok, think I’m having a great life, and decide to take a boat to join me. But that’s not the reality, life here is hard. I never told anyone to come or not to come.”
A caravan of migrants crosses a bridge leaving Tapachula, southern Mexico, on January 26, 2025.
The journey to U.S. can take months, with West African migrants blending into a global tide of people in transit. In Mexico, migrant caravans bring together thousands walking north toward the U.S. border, a strategy meant to reduce the risks of traveling alone and falling prey to criminal groups.
A man walks through the shadows in the Bronx district of New York City, on January 21, 2025.
Once the initial excitement fades, the weight of reality begins to settle in. Host economies often rely on migrants to fill low-paid, precarious jobs that locals refuse to take. Yet admitting this vulnerability is unthinkable, it would shatter the carefully maintained image of the fearless adventurer. The burden of failure can quickly become unbearable.
A man raises his hands and begins singing a Mouride religious chant inside the Senegalese Association of America in New York, on January 19, 2025.
That same Sunday evening, the body of his friend, Magatte Sylla was flown back to his wife and two children. A fundraiser organized by fellow Senegalese migrants in the U.S. gathered enough money to return the deceased to Dakar, the place he had left one year earlier in pursuit of the American dream.
Chained to a window, Sidi Ahmed Mohamed sleeps in his room at the psychiatric hospital in Nouakchott, Mauritania, on December 12, 2024.
His father, sitting beside him, explains that everything changed when people started talking to him about United States: “He kept saying that he had to go. They showed him videos, photos and he couldn’t think about anything else.” Unable to afford the trip, the father could only watch his son slipping into a spiral of obsession and mental illness.
A horse stands in a burning rice field in the countryside near Rosso, Mauritania, on November 29, 2024.
Villages slowly empty as young people leave, one after another. Nearly every family has experienced the anxious uncertainty of waiting, hoping their loved ones would reach their destination safely. Many never heard from them again. As the population continues to decrease, the sense of helplessness and incomprehension grows stronger among the ones who remain, mirroring the scale of a phenomenon that feels increasingly unstoppable.