![]() The fact that TikTok pushes every single video out into these feeds, at least for a test run, means that any user, no matter how obscure, can audition for virality. Then your version might worm its way into the algorithmically generated “For You” feeds of other users and find its own success. It wants you to make your own version of the same thing. TikTok doesn’t want you to comment on someone else’s video. This setup has a natural outcome: As soon as content about some specific thing-or some specific person-trends, more content of that type will be produced. Its users interact more heavily with their own content, and with the site’s algorithm, than with one another. TikTok was instead designed for iteration. On account of this structure, experts such as Klug assert that TikTok is not primarily a social space, like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, where users define themselves through conversation and visible interaction with their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and celebrities. But these features seem unrelated to the main functions of the app: watching videos getting your videos to be watched. ![]() Users can also exchange private messages. The platform’s videos are served with comment sections, which are chaotic and difficult to navigate. “It is designed to be an app that gives you entertainment content,” Daniel Klug, a system-science researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. TikTok is not designed to be a social network. One still might ask: How did TikTok get to be the dogpiling-on-random-people app, anyway-and is there any way to make it stop? These are useful features, but they can’t quite address the culture of “dogpiling on random people” (as I’m inclined to call it). Emma Spiro, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, refers to these diverse events (with differing degrees of harm) as “mass convergences of attention.” 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.”Ī representative for TikTok did not acknowledge this well-documented tendency, but told me that the site prohibits harassment, bullying, and “hateful behavior,” while allowing users to filter comments, block accounts in bulk, and make their content private. In just the past half year, TikTok mobs have dived headlong into engagement-baiting investigations of recent murders, online “ pedophile rings,” and the legitimacy of popular creators’ neurological or psychiatric conditions. This problem is so rampant that it’s difficult to name. “During my tenure as Couch Guy,” Couch Guy later wrote in an essay for Slate, “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.’” Next up was Sabrina Prater, a trans woman from outside of Flint, Michigan, who a mob of TikTok users decided might be a “Buffalo Bill”–style serial killer based, similarly, on her “vibes.” On and on it goes: The platform generally known for dance trends and audio memes is also the site of serial “investigations,” in which users inflate the slightest signal into a source of outrage and obsession. A few months before West Elm Caleb, the site-wide villain was Couch Guy-a guy who had been recorded sitting on a couch, looking sort of excited but not excited enough when surprised by a visit from his long-distance girlfriend. On TikTok, which is now the most popular web domain in the world, this phenomenon has become oddly repetitive. (She found this offensive.) Pretty soon brands were getting in on the West Elm Caleb conversation, as finding any excuse to talk about this pretty average dater in New York City became engagement-metric gold. One woman recalled how he had told her that he found it harder to go on dates in the winter, because of the cold. In January, after a couple of New York women with substantial TikTok followings discovered that they had been dating Caleb simultaneously, it quickly came out that he was guilty of other crimes-sending the same Spotify playlist to multiple people, for instance, and not returning text messages. Hardly anyone expects what happened to the mythological figure of “West Elm Caleb,” a bumbling villain of the New York dating scene and hapless victim of the internet. ![]() When a person joins an online-dating app, and then starts texting some of the people they’ve met on that app, and then makes plans to hang out with some of those people in the hopes of making out, they have a reasonable, limited expectation of privacy.
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