TikTok: C or D

can't stop watching this

I think this is the best edited Tik Tok I’ve ever seen.

pic.twitter.com/OUCqiBKkSK

— Kristi Anderson (@CinderSlays) January 9, 2021

wtf
that makes mj's black and white seem amateurish

similar in the comments

This guy too pic.twitter.com/gzgncyu5o6

— n0 name (@mrnonamerod) January 10, 2021

^nice

tiktoks that are almost definitely terrifying to watch while high:

"wow these edibles are shit" pic.twitter.com/JT5Z7PALC7

— 𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖆 ✣ 𝖑𝖔𝖗𝖉 ⬜⬜🟥🟥⬜⬜👽 (@VPestilenZ) December 16, 2020

(@connection_intercepted)

awesome

amazing

I just watched the sea shanty, done with the four lads originally from a photo. Not only is it some dope work, the shanty is catchy as hell.

the shanty is horrifically catchy and satisfying to listen to but it's been haunting my dreams

oh, can't wait for that tonight then

gonna post it anyway

Sea shanty tiktok is WILD pic.twitter.com/rjY1iXFQkA

— Kristian 🇳🇱 (@vonstrenginho) January 14, 2021

https://www.tiktok.com/@overloadcomedy/video/6920289799702203650

A little weirded out by how weirded out the kids are by their non-mirrored faces.

https://www.tiktok.com/@maelynesque/video/6910768593911221509?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1

?eah, ?eah, ?eah, I left that extra part in post haste.

No one is doing TikTok like him pic.twitter.com/TpjcGovjKX

— Kalhan (@KalhanR) March 18, 2021

i like the sea shanty video.

however.

the platform is mostly dystopian, as are the instagram "reels." most videos are autobiographical and self-commodifying -- people commenting on their personal life, their relationships, etc, but in a way that burnishes a curated image. so far so predictable. sometimes they are selling a product or have a cashapp in their bio or whatever.

what's weird is the way the users do so, usually recreating some kind of popular meme. they turn themselves not just into a commodity, but into a very dumb meme. and they draw their pets and family members into it. like they're all cartoon people, living out a slapstick existence. the most terrifying of these videos involve that robot-voice narration.

it's like, if adorno wrote a dystopian novel, this would be what people were doing all day in his version of 2021.

i've got a video for you treeship

https://www.tiktok.com/@geezyunit/video/6947387987659443461

ok, that's pretty good.

my usually social media-illiterate became obsessed with tiktok over the past year and now i can't send videos of my cats to the family gc for fear that she'll turn them into videos with stuff dubbed over them. she's getting to a point where she sees everything as fodder and she's addicted to getting views. she and my dad keep guilting me and my brother for not liking her videos and we keep having to explain that you need to have an account to do that

social media-illiterate MOM**** became etc

am also about 90% certain that she's going to end up in a cult as she's already shown an inclination towards some of the culty new age grifters - she was already prone to that stuff before stepping into a social media platform that shoves it in her face

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdqJj29q/

I’m not interested in your hot takes about Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/djBOCs1pR2

— Patrick J Loller (@PatrickLoller) August 16, 2021

this cadence is like having a needle shoved into your eardrum repeatedly

tiktok is where you get to listen to the world's most obnoxious twitter accounts recite their tweets in the exact cadence you always imagined they would use

Not sure why the perpetrator of that TikTok thought that adopting the persona of Howdy Doody would lend credence to his views about foreign policy and military interventionism.

More of this, less of blandly attractive people lip syncing

https://www.tiktok.com/@hendersizzle/video/7001618935770615045

im on this now, and i am single-handedly saving it from itself

Okay, a buddy's kid was recently caught (or involved with) ripping a soap dispenser off the wall in the school bathroom (he denies having anything to do with it). I thought it was sort of an odd, kind of old-fashioned form of juvenile delinquency, something you might see in a 1981 after school special, or Seven Green Bottles.

But no, it's a tiktok challenge! And it's sweeping the nation: ...the goal of a new trend, the "Deviant Licks" TikTok challenge, is to either damage school property or steal items and post videos of it online in an attempt to go viral.

This includes vandalizing bathrooms, cutting up books, etc.

Sorry if I'm the last person on the planet to know about this.. I feel old

Furthermore, I question the wisdom of posting evidence of these crimes online, but what do I know

be gay
do crimes
post about them
online

Do you see the perpetrator?
Yeah I’m right here.

this is pretty good: In the video, the voice over the intercom said they don’t have the resources to call each of their parents to tell them what’s been happening, so the “only recourse they have” is to remove the doors from the hinges in both the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms.

My worst possible nightmare as a kid

lol Andy i don’t know where that’s from but the whole thing sounds like a pretty elaborate wind-up

even if it’s true, if it wasn’t tiktok kids would find other reasons to be idiots. i think you were right at the beginning: it’s a tale as old as time. i have a 12-yo who’s a bit of an idiot and even he would know that doing this kind of thing for the likes is moronic

No, it's a thing. It's called "devious licks," and it started with just swiping random things from school, like boxes of masks, and displaying them on TikTok. Vandalizing bathrooms was September's "challenge" so we did have a lot of people trashing the bathrooms at my school. My guess is it's fading out now, though, because the next set of challenges issued involved actual physical assault and most kids aren't dumb enough to slap their teachers and put it on TikTok.

Lily and Andy are right, but so is Tracer. If it wasn't #deviouslicks, there'd be another excuse.

Yes, school vandalism is as old of time; but voluntarily posting incriminating evidence online seems purely 21st Century.

Apparently tiktok has started pulling all the videos anyway, which may help explain why the phenomenon is fading

if it's a no bones day, i vandalize a junior high restroom

The rabbit hole of this one user claiming Ancient Rome did not exist and all the answers from academia is pure entertainment.

Just found out recently that my neighbours kid is a tik tok star with like two million follows.

Most of this shit is just made up, right? The pranks, pratfalls and funniest home video BS? Like the kids are all just pretending something went wrong and planned it?

And ones like that "devious licks" upthread - someone started that a joke Tide Pods style to see what would happen, right? Tell me people arent actively this much Darwin Awards material.

devious licks is an actual thing but the note upthread that if it weren't this it would be something else is 100% accurate as well

New D&D player: so the one I really don’t understand is “chaotic good?” Like what does that even look like…

Me: I gotchu https://t.co/EH8oNjVbcO

— Rusty Foster (@fka_tabs) May 12, 2022

That is amazing.

the duddest
https://www.stereogum.com/2187634/halsey-tiktok-viral-song/news/

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/sexual-health/a40938627/what-is-vabbing/

● Washing your hands both before and after

● Not allowing areas you’ve ‘vabbed’ to touch anything or anyone

● Wiping down gym equipment before and after use

● Making sure you get checked by a professional if you think you sense an unusual or bad odour

TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-63213567

"vabbing"

The wisdom of the ancients alive today

this overlong essay on the "enshittification" of TikTok makes a good case for the vicious cycle of social media

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Hmm

I wrote about the unhinged therapists making videos about their clients on TikTok, and how social media has smoothed over the ethical issues of certain professions turning their jobs into content https://t.co/u6kflar9NN

— Sarah Manavis (@sarahmanavis) January 26, 2023

that should do it lol

apparently all this grandstanding/executive ordering trump is doing is pretty legally meaningless and theres a good chance that once the grace period to find a buyer expires tiktok will be unavailable in america, details in vid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGXU46rMtRE

i think it's unavailable on the app stores

oh for sure. Ryan Broderick wrote last week that what makes US politicians nervous about TikTok is that they "assume it’s doing to us what American companies like Meta and Google have done to other countries. Which is why they can’t actually admit that none of this is about free speech or national security. It’s primarily about measuring — and defining — Chinese soft power."

― jaymc, Thursday, January 23, 2025 4:57 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Absolutely, but also my FYP has been full of people reading A People's History of the United States and On Tyranny
and lots of other "subversive" material. And calling out electeds and putting the spotlight on companies and CEOs and shareholders and the Resnicks and lots of things that most people don't know about (even if they're not exactly "secret").

i think it's unavailable on the app stores

― what angers me about the smurfs these days (voodoo chili), Thursday, January 23, 2025 12:11 PM (twenty-eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

yup thats the main mechanism of the law, tiktok shutting down its servers for half a day was just a political stunt

There are multiple accounts that just report on sitting officials' stock trades.

chinese soft power and subversive materials arent necessarily unrelated, china could be promoting that stuff to sow discord in america, banning free palestine is kind of telling in that regard

its an interesting dynamic to ponder, gotta stand with china on this case lol, tho obvs its not hard to imagine a situation where it would be less to my personal tastes if say china invaded taiwan

I'm pretty happy for people to use social media to self-organize leftist reading groups for political education, seems like an overall good. The fact that it implicates the School of the Americas or United Fruit or robber barons who did anti-union massacres or whatever...it's history.

yeah it seems like some people were taken aback by "free palestine" stuff on TikTok and the only way they could comprehend it was to assume that it was the result of a meddling foreign power, rather than a natural outgrowth of homegrown activist movements and discourses that had gained purchase among young people over the last decade or two.

it can be both tho a meddling foreign government is going to try to promote natural affinity groups that are convenient to their ends, it would prob be beyond even the powers of social media to create movements from scratch, and having the worlds best recommendation engine is the perfect tool to find and cultivate the stuff theyre interested in promoting

yes and a deeper issue from the standpoint of organizing imo is, how effective can we really be if we don't have reliable information about our community, what they're interested in seeing, etc? it seems like we've accepted a scenario where we're okay with never really knowing what's going on, how certain things are being boosted or silenced, and i feel like paranoia or suspicion is a natural byproduct of that. and so at the moment i'm inclined to be thinking about getting back to basics and away from reliance on social media

Several people seem to be arguing with a point no one is making. I am not, nor is anyone, saying that organizing can be done only on social media and be effective or have longevity. Or that "we" should rely on an app for "information about our community." That's just weird. That's like the epidemic of someone posting "I like pancakes" and 873484 replies saying, "OH SO YOU HATE FRENCH TOAST?"

By all means go and do things irl. It is also possible for people to share information on the internet. Like...?

i was responding to the two previous posts, which seemed to highlight a problem around determining whether activity on social media is a "natural" phenomenon or the result of manipulation, either by platforms or external agents.

i never said that you should feel bad for finding interesting things on tik tok, or that nobody should share information on the internet.

im sure this has been said tons of times itt but it is interesting that tiktok is winning via showing people things they want to see where all the american platforms seem to be full of crap that no one likes these days, except maybe youtube i guess, youtube is always the secret winner

Yeah fwiw YouTube seems to have moved past the "we see you watched a lecture on feminism, here are some videos of Ben Shapiro DEMOLISHING feminism" era and become pretty good at sussing out what I actually want to watch. Difficult to think of it as social media tho.

yeah its more a streaming algo with social aspects, but so is tiktok, which is prob part of what makes them more pleasant than the purer social networks

In orbit otm in this thread btw

TikTok be different and is what you make of it iykyk

Should govt employees have their Whatsapp taken away? It seems any Paragon client can access anything in their phones. But I guess that’s… okay? Since Meta and Paragon aren’t Chinese?

https://fortune.com/2025/02/14/gen-z-teens-experts-trust-influencers-tiktok

It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t believe in experts. Rather, it’s that social media has rewired the way they think about credibility. TikTok influencers are now our “friends.” The algorithm repeats and reinforces what we already believe. And a well-edited, engaging video is much more convincing than a long, complicated explanation from a professional. Credibility today isn’t about expertise but about who tells the most compelling story. This change is slowly reshaping how an entire generation decides what is true and what is not—sometimes with demonstrably negative results.

My only experience with TikTok was cute animal videos being shared before everyone in my circle went back to Instagram and Youtube for that.

The things I hear and see now that I'm around dozens of people watching TikTok for hours a day... burn it down, burn it all the way down. As a cesspool of misinformation, AI slop, racism and true crime scare stories it's worse than Facebook - or maybe it's just that Facebook is mostly silent and not blaring from a forklift driver's bluetooth speaker.