Bait-switching's hold over TikTok
TikTok is burning people at the stake with amateur sleuthing. (Photo: Wikipedia)
For Filipinos, TikTok is the top video-based app, with over 300 million active users since July 2020, double that of Instagram which has shifted its focus to stories and reels.
But it's virality has become oddly repetitive. While dance trends and audio memes saturate our feeds, it is also the site of engagement-baiting investigations. Its victims are anywhere from the legitimacy of influencers' neurological or psychiatric condition, catfishing, serial killers, pedophile rings, to anything remotely scandalous recorded on the internet.
Abbie Richards, a TikTok creator who also researches and writes reports about disinformation on the platform, described them to me as “the memeification of a person.” The internet-culture reporter Ryan Broderick calls TikTok a “witch hunt machine.”
A few months ago, the site-wide villain in the US was Couch Guy—a guy who had been recorded looking sort of excited but not excited enough when surprise visited by his LDR girlfriend.
“During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes’,” Couch Guy later wrote in an essay for Slate.
Unlike Facebook, Instagram or Twitter where users are defined by visible interactions with friends or the people they follow, TikTok is not designed to be a social space.
Instead, the short video platform gives entertainment content designed for iteration. Tiktok doesn't want you to comment on someone else's video. TikTok wants you to make your own version of the same thing.
The turning point is that it pushes every video out into the algorithmically generated For You pages of other users. Unlike other platforms, TikToks don't need to be retweeted by users with big followings or shared by big Facebook pages. TikTok doesn't need a middleman. No matter how obscure, you are guaranteed a test audience by default. The platform's fickleness implies that remaining relevant means it'd be too costly to miss out dogpiling on any controversy the algorithm seems to favor before it's too late.
Once a TikTok starts to get attention, its spread is left unchecked in its volatile participatory culture.
“If you’re somebody who has a small following and usually your videos get a couple hundred views, then what is your responsibility to assume that any video can be seen by millions of people?” Abbie Richards asks. “It’s just, like, a weird new problem that we have to figure out.”
Maybe TikTok can do a better job of not derailing people’s lives with amateur sleuthing, mockery, and callouts.
Michael Trice, a MIT lecturer interested in how platforms generate amorality, comments how online communities are also more attuned to the miserable existence of a site’s main character energy. “I actually think users have been pretty good on Twitter and Reddit and even on Facebook at sort of self-educating over time. It’s likely that this form of self-education will come more and more to TikTok.”
