Malala Yousafzai has been a global name for more than a decade. The youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history and Pakistani female education activist is no stranger to being a phenomenon.
But as Yousafzai, now 28, has been promoting her new memoir, Finding My Way, she has risen to a new kind of prominence, becoming an unexpected social media phenomenon.
Not only has Yousafzai managed to capture people’s attention in a relentless attention economy that can be more rewarding to the extreme, but she has also managed to cut through the social media algorithm after a prolonged period of domination by louder voices.
Here is a look at how Yousafzai became an unexpected social media phenomenon, with one expert saying she has appeal because she is not “so different than your average 28-year-old woman!”
Newsweek has contacted a representative of Yousafzai via email for comment.
Malala Yousafzai’s Meteoric Rise
Yousafzai is known largely for her work in education activism, a campaign she began at 11 years old, writing a blog for the BBC as the Taliban shuttered schools where she lived in Pakistan.
At 15 years old, a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai in the head while she was on a school bus. She miraculously survived and was airlifted to the United Kingdom. She has since become an icon of the campaign for the rights of girls to receive an education and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014 at the age of 17.
As of late October, Google searches for Yousafzai have skyrocketed in the United States.
Videos either posted by or featuring Yousafzai are amassing views by the millions. Having posted her first TikTok in August, her initial videos received a few hundred thousand views. Now, as of press time, the most popular video on her profile has been viewed over 39 million times.
A surge in popularity online like this is rare for anyone, let alone someone who has been a public figure for more than a decade. So, what’s driving it?
Virality, Authenticity and Popular Culture
Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, told Newsweek, “Instead of being constrained by Western media narratives that paint her as a savior and a hero, now we get to hear from Yousafzai herself. Recent press interviews, where she talks about trying cannabis or being a university student, feel relatable and exciting. She’s not so different than your average 28-year-old woman!”
And indeed, Yousafzai’s content has managed to both tap into a cultural moment and feel authentic.
In her most popular TikTok video, she pokes fun at the fact that people have used her image as so-called study inspiration for years. ”When GenZ use me photo to lock in for studies but it’s a pic from 13 years ago,” in a separate TikTok, she suggested alternative pictures of herself to be used as study inspiration, light-heartedly addressing her legacy status among young people.
Beyond this, she has participated in viral trends, including the Beez In The Trap social media trend with talk show host Jimmy Fallon, in a video viewed 55 million times on TikTok. The main response to that video? Shock, as it’s pretty rare to see any activist, let alone a Nobel Prize winner, rapping along to a Nicki Minaj song, which is the crux of that trend. The top comment on TikTok, liked more than 185,000 times, reads “Oh my god I don’t think people understand how revolutionary this is.”
“Malala is a great example of the kind of empowerment feminism that was embraced by social media until very recently,” Rottenberg told Newsweek. “I can see why her social media presence is popular at a time when things look so bleak—it is a site that provides some hope,” she added.
Rottenberg also said that it is easy for Yousafzai’s social media content to compete with this, given the media attention she has long received.
Newsweek also spoke with Professor Jessica Ringrose of University College London, who described Yousafzai as a “fairly mainstream actor,” and said her content is “very normative.”
Ringrose argues that the Yousafzai is not taking a political stance, and that this could be why her content is so popular. “Malala is promoting a conservative heteronormative relationship as well; she is often promoting her own liberalism, rather than taking a political stance on global issues.”
Amid her soaring online popularity, Yousafzai has faced some criticism online for a perceived lack of speaking out on political issues, specifically, the Israel-Hamas war. Yousafzai addressed this criticism while speaking to The Guardian and said that “I wish I lived in a world where I could do a tweet and the world would stop the war,” and added that, “There isn’t a night where I don’t think about what I can do.”
A Shifting Social Media Landscape
“As we move from a moment where feminism became popular to a moment where we are seeing a backlash to feminism and the rise of the far right, this might be a moment where these different sensibilities are competing and vying for dominance on social media,” Rottenberg added.
Social media algorithms have seen phenomena like the trad wife, the sorority girl, or the conservative hot girl, all of which are associated with right-wing political ideologies, gain recognition in recent years as critics argue that feminism and feminist figures have seemed to lose popularity.
“This time last year, there was a considerable moral panic around trad influencers. In 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and TikTok’s rise to being a major conduit for the influencer industry, GenZ was characterized as more progressive. But 4 years later as the 2024 U.S. presidential election was in full swing, it became clear that GenZ leaned more conservative (at least in the U.S.),” Rauchberg said.
“Now, almost a year into President Trump’s second term, we’re starting to see the pendulum swing the other way. Constituents across party lines are frustrated, scared, and nostalgic for more politically hopeful times,” Rauchberg said. She added, “Just like we gravitate towards influencers because they feel more relatable to everyday people, Yousafzai’s current star image doesn’t feel out of touch or limited by a particular narrative. And at the same time, she doesn’t appear fake or inauthentic: we feel like we’re getting to know the real Malala.”
Her appeal runs deeper than merely hopping on a viral trend. In her social media rise, Yousafzai is both providing a peek behind the curtain at her life and maybe inspiring hope during turbulent political times.
Zoetanya Sujon, Reader and Programme Director in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, highlighted these themes while speaking to Newsweek over email.
“The current geopolitical context is marked by bloodshed, conflict, increasing restrictions of civil and human rights, and an emboldening of politically conservative values that often target those who are most vulnerable. It’s about time that someone who campaigns for girls and women’s rights to education shows up on our screens alongside endless jokes about ‘6 7’, brain rot, and never-ending streams of bad news,” Sujon said.
Sujon highlighted to Newsweek that in her view, people are rarely the winners in the algorithm. But “If we are having a brief cultural moment where educational justice is popular and Pashtun, let’s celebrate today’s viral emphasis on women, justice, and survival.”
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