Stepchickens attempts to rule the roost of social network apps

‘Mother hen’ has devout group of teens borrowing tactics from comment raid groups

Last week, a new name broke into Apple’s most-downloaded social networking apps. Among the usual suspects of Instagram, Facebook and TikTok appeared an app called Stepchickens, with a cryptic blue selfie as its logo.

The image has become nearly ubiquitous on TikTok, as tens of thousands of users have changed their avatars to show their loyalty to its subject: Melissa Ong, the 27-year-old “mother hen” of the platform’s largest and most powerful “cult,” the Step Chickens.

Cults on TikTok aren’t the ideological ones most people are familiar with. Instead, they are open fandoms revolving around a single creator. Much like the “stans” of pop figures and franchises, members of TikTok cults stream songs, buy merch, create news update accounts and fervently defend their leaders in the comment sections of posts. The biggest difference is that TikTok’s cult leaders are not independently famous. They’re upstart creators building a fan base on social media.

Ong represents a relatively new kind of influencer, one who has seized a time of great isolation and idleness to capture the interest of a rapt user base.

“I made this video where I was speaking into my phone camera like, ‘Hey guys I think we should start a religion,’ ” she said in a phone interview on Friday. “Then, I was like, ‘Let’s start a cult.’ ”

The Step Chickens Assemble

TikTok users have been forming cults (of personality) and armies (the nonviolent kind) for months now, borrowing tactics from comment raid groups on other platforms. The Dum Dum gang, for instance, gained a following last year by taking over the comment sections of public figures like former U.S. president Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg.

In January, thousands of teenagers on TikTok created a Lego Star Wars army. In April, users took sides in a purple vs. green alien “gang war.” And on May 8, the Step Chickens were born.

The name comes from a video series Ong shared on TikTok called “Corn

Hub,” in which she parodies pornographic tropes including one where a stepbrother seduces a stepsister. Ong reenacted the plot wearing a chicken suit; the video racked up 1.1 million views.

‘People want to be a part of something’

Before Ong became a full-time content creator, she worked at Google and Yahoo, where she befriended Sam Mueller, a technologist. Mueller left Yahoo to start Blink Labs, a tech company that recently built a social networking app called Blink (“if TikTok and Discord had a love child,” he said).

Ong’s cult had asked her to create a dedicated space for them to meet, such as a Step Chickens Discord server. But Mueller had another idea: What if he rebranded Blink around Step Chickens to capitalize on Ong’s popularity and give her fans a place to connect? “I was like, that would be hilarious if my TikTok cult had its own app,” Ong said.

“I envisioned Melissa’s profile photo on millions of devices next to the social media giants,” Mueller said.

Since the app rebranded as Stepchickens, it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The company’s four-person team has struggled to keep up. “We’ve been scrambling to keep the servers stable and accept all the users registering. It continues to grow,” Mueller said.

“I really believe Melissa has tapped into the zeitgeist of bored teens in quarantine and given them a purpose,” he said. “As strange as it sounds, that’s what’s going on. It keeps getting bigger and bigger because it captures the moment.”

True fans over huge followings

The rise of these cults is a sharp contrast to the dance star culture that TikTok is best known for. The cults lift up unlikely influencers and allow members to feel complicit in their rise.

“I think that in this social media generation most youths struggle with low selfesteem. They see these seemingly perfect creators, carbon-copy after carboncopy,” said Danny Nguyen, 16, one of Ong’s followers. “The Step Chickens, to me, is the antithesis of that. Our community is based on embracing our individuality and quirks that make us truly unique and stand out.”