“Save this TikTok for your next Uber Ride: Gendered Violence and Social Media in Everyday Ride-Hailing Mobilities”

Yi Fan Liu (10 November 2024)

Safety As An Atmosphere

When do we think about safety? It is something that often hangs in the back of our minds as we move around in cities. When we cross the road, we try to look left and right for incoming traffic. When we drive, we are supposed to signal and make sure that we abide by traffic laws. When we cycle, we try to take the necessary precautions and be alert against any potential collisions. These are instances of physical safety that all of us, regardless of our identities, can relate to.

Yet, in certain scenarios, safety is not just about physical safety. It can also be intimately tied to who we are, our gender, race, class and sexuality – or what Brands and Schwanen call ‘subjective safety’. One such case is taking an Uber – or any other ride-hailing service – in today’s platformised world. For women, people of colour, and minority groups, being in a contained vehicle with an Uber driver of a different identity is an everyday lived experience that is negotiated not just based on who is in the driver’s seat, but also based on where we are situated contextually: what we have with us, where we came from, where we are going, when we are riding, how long we are riding, and the circumstances that take place within and beyond the confines of the vehicle.

Whether or not we feel safe is not always a straightforward concept that sees the driver and the passenger as being on opposite ends of a binary of safety/danger. Instead, I echo much of the existing research on safety and argue that it is an atmosphere. An atmosphere that is viscerally felt by our bodily senses and co-constituted by various elements: human (driver, passenger), non-human (car, phone, self-defence items, road, street), discursive (conversations between driver and passenger, news reports on assault cases in ride-hailing services) and temporal (day, night, duration). The atmosphere in an Uber is not to be thought of as simply a sum of its elements, nor is it bounded or affixed to the current permutation of elements. Rather, it is constantly (re)assembled and (re)negotiated. We could say that we feel a shift in the air when a loved one calls to check in on us, or when the driver strikes a conversation about an uncomfortable topic, or when the car turns into a quiet corner of the neighbourhood. Whilst an atmosphere may become safer or unsafe, it does not stay in one state for long and is prone to change.

Thinking about safety as an atmosphere also prompts us to think about intersectionality – the ways in which aspects of our identities intersect to form specific experiences of power, privilege and vulnerability. Here, social categories of gender, race, class and sexuality are necessary in understanding why we might feel a certain atmosphere in an Uber ride, but they are by no means static and deterministic of how Uber rides would always go, as they manifest themselves differently according to each context. For instance, as a Singaporean Chinese woman, my ride-hailing experiences differ between Singapore and the UK. In Singapore, where about 75% of Singaporeans are Chinese, I embody a certain kind of racialised privilege that both men and women of minority racial groups do not have. This meant that while I may worry about the possibility of experiencing some form of gendered violence each time I engage with a ride-hailing service, my ‘Chinese privilege’ cannot be ignored. On the other hand, in the UK, my race and the markers that signal my status as a foreigner matter alongside my gender. As such, my concerns regarding safety may look different from those of other women who may undoubtedly feel vulnerable on the basis of gender, but may also embody particular privileges pertaining to race and citizenship. It is important to note that these privileges do not ‘cancel out’ risks of gendered violence. Rather, they add nuance to why women could have very different experiences insofar as there is a shared sense of vulnerability.

Making Safe Atmospheres in Everyday Ride-Shares

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Uber reported 141 rapes and 998 sexual assault incidents in the United States even though ridership had declined. In the same year, there was also an emergence of TikToks made of pseudo-phone dialogues for passengers to play in their rides. The TikTok videos simulated video phone calls, with the creator asking questions like “where are you?” and “can you send me your live location?”, to which women, or anybody else who feels unsafe in the ride, could pretend to reply accordingly in order to deter any dangerous motives from drivers.

These viral TikToks were interesting because the passenger uses them to put on a performance and discursively alter the atmosphere in the car. They make the unseen – the idea that the passenger is someone who is cared for – seen, through performing of oneself as being cared for. And they make the unspoken – the fear that one might have in ride-hailing services – spoken, through performing of oneself as someone who is vulnerable and needs to be cared for. These digitally-mediated infrastructures of care position the passenger as not just a body. Rather, the passenger belongs, and they have social networks that will react and respond if something bad were to happen to them. Now, instead of being in a position where the passenger could possibly be affected by the driver, the passenger seemingly has the power to shift the air through the staged phone call.

These TikToks therefore appear to emerge as a form of micro-scale justice that asserts our right to not just move in the city, but also to move safely in the city. Under these TikToks, there are people who shared how the videos had actually helped them in real life. Yet, the effectiveness of such micro-scale justices remains to be seen on a more permanent and larger scale. Much of the burden still falls on the passenger who has a smartphone that can be their proxy to safety, and they require a certain level of social media literacy to even be using these videos in the first place. These are inextricably linked to classed dimensions where one needs to have the financial means to own a smartphone and have a data plan that allows access to TikTok. There is also a need for what I call ‘digital dexterity’ to actually pull it off and make it look convincing to the driver, and this is always culturally nuanced. Where most of these TikToks are made by content creators based in Anglophone countries, their dialogues, accents and mannerisms are also culturally situated, which would sound out of place when used elsewhere. A safe atmosphere is therefore tentative and fragile, and whilst it may be temporarily achieved through quick solutions like these TikToks, they are by no means a long-term fix to the wider problem at hand.

There is also an elephant in the room here. Ride-hailing services, or the gig economy as a whole, operate on very lean business models in current late-stage capitalism. Even though these lean business models allow ride-hailing services to be relatively affordable and accessible, they also tend to reduce the rigour of surveillance, legal enforcement and punitive measures when it comes to violence and assault crimes. Further, violence and assault are not just exclusive to passengers; women and vulnerable individuals who work as ride-hailing drivers themselves also risk such encounters with passengers and have their livelihoods implicated as well.

The Right and Freedom to Move Safely

What does this mean for safety and mobility? For one, we need to prioritise and position safety as both a right, and a freedom, to move. Where we often talk about accessibility and the right to access streets, roads, public transportation, and so forth, we need to also start talking about the right to access these spaces and modes safely. We also need to see safety as an atmosphere that is fluid and not a straightforward sum of its parts. There are multiple elements, at any given time and at any given place, that affect how we feel when we enter and ride an Uber. As discussed in this piece, our identities, socio-material objects and environments, as well as the wider political and economic milieu, contribute towards complex topographies of power, privilege and vulnerability within each Uber ride. Our approach towards understanding safety – whether it is in research, activism, or policy – therefore needs to be oriented towards each person’s lived encounters with such mobility services.

Yi Fan Liu (she/her) is a DPhil candidate looking at gender, affect and care in shared mobility services. She is interested in understanding how particular gendered atmospheres get (re)produced within/beyond the confines of the car, and relationally between the driver and the passenger(s). She seeks to understand how care (re)assembles these atmospheres, and the implications for safety and mobility.

This piece was initially presented at a workshop held by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (hybrid) on 4-5 July 2024. It was supported by Wellcome Trust Centre Grant [203109/Z/16/Z] and explored “Everyday Mobilities: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Perspectives on Getting Around.” (You can see event recordings here - day 1; day 2.). In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop explored these developments, examining the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national, and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around”. The "Everyday Mobilities” series on M&M is a first step towards the establishment of an Everyday Mobilities interdisciplinary network bringing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners.