Sorry you went viral
WHEN Junna Faylee started making money on TikTok, the 21year-old anime and gaming fan in London made it the centerpiece of her life.
She devoted every night and weekend to making videos. She optimized her room in eyecatching pink.
And she hired a management team to handle her videobranding deals and bookkeeping, even though she still lived at home.
Now, as the 9-million-follower ‘nintendo.grl’, she is one of the app’s biggest successes, and she feels like she’s achieved a creative dream. But competing for a ention, she said, can o en feel like working a shi that doesn’t end.
And winning it can feel even worse, since her most viral videos also bring on the heaviest floods of hateful insults and sexist trolls.
She has woken up in the middle of the night to check her phone and, a er some videos, has refused to sleep, feeling too anxious about the response.
“There is this power TikTok has: It’s just so, so popular, and that can be a scary thing . ... You have to be constantly fighting against other content creators to be seen,” she said.
“You don’t realise the impact of having so many eyes on you,” she added.
“Those people who’ve chosen not to like you, they’re going to see you, right there on their screen, and nothing you do is going to make a difference. You’ve got to learn to deal with the hate.”
TikTok has become the world’s biggest gatekeeper for online fame, and its rise has helped supercharge an internet reality: One great moment can be the difference between a celebrity and a nobody. The app’s promise is especially a ractive to the millions of young people aspiring to a life or career as an online influencer. What if anyone could be a star?
But this new era of instant, inexplicable a ention has also come at a price.
In interviews with more than three dozen TikTok creators, many noted that the app’s reach o en brings with it relentless demands: from angry commenters, from audience expectations, even from the algorithm itself.
TikTok’s sticky, colorful, endlessly amusing platform promises a scale of virality unlike anything else on the internet, and its algorithm is built to blast creators’ videos to crowds of anonymous strangers in hopes of maximizing their spread.
But TikTok is designed for entertainment, and no one is guaranteed a receptive audience.
The app’s culture of fast-twitch reactions and fleeting fame has le many creators feeling overwhelmed by dashed-off insults or mean-spirited critiques.
And ge ing big too quickly, some said, o en meant their videos would be seen by viewers who hated what they said, how they looked or who they were – and had many ways to tear them down.
“The phrase people use is ‘ge ing on the wrong side of TikTok’,” said Casey Fiesler, an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who researches online communities.
“One person told me, ‘I wish I could just stop my videos at 30,000 views’.”
Some TikTok creators said they were surprised by how reactive and cruel their videos’ commenters could be: Some have received death threats for supporting abortion, making cheesy videos or selling expensive chocolate bars.
But it’s TikTok’s collaborative video tools that have really made its ‘hate comments come to life’, said Josh Helfgo , 33, who posts about LGBTQ issues to his more than 5 million followers.
People o en post quick reactions to others’ videos, using features like ‘duet’ and ‘stitch’, that leverage the original videos’ virality to amplify their insults in what he called ‘a new form of bullying’.
“The harsher you are to the original video,” he said, “the more views you’re going to get.”
Harassment is an internet-wide issue, and TikTok has said it’s working to strengthen its creator protections, including by allowing people to automatically block offensive comments.
The company said last month it had removed more than 100 million videos between April and June for harassment, ‘hateful behaviour’ and other concerns – roughly 1 per cent of the 11 billion videos that had been posted in those three months.
“We want people to feel safe, welcome and in control of their experience,” said Hilary McQuaide, a TikTok spokeswoman.
“We pair robust safety policies against bullying, harassment and hateful behavior with tools to empower creators to decide who can watch and engage.”
But some TikTokers said they worry the app’s spo y policing and explosive popularity have le creators vulnerable to a ack.
Where Facebook’s algorithms once stoked in-group anger to boost engagement, TikTok has opened those groups to everyone, expanding the problem to global scale.
“Everything on TikTok is bigger. The views are bigger, the follower counts are higher, the love is louder, and the hate is way, way more enormous,” Helfgo said.
“In the first second of the video people will be shouting insults into the camera. If your face is bright red or your eyes are welling up, people will stop scrolling and you’ll get more views. TikTok encourages emotion, and the most engaging emotion is anger.”
The first brush with TikTok fame can be easy.
Creators don’t need an existing audience to win a ention – the algorithm handles that – and the app’s viral popularity has quickly christened a new class of stars.
Roughly 40,000 TikTok accounts have more than a million followers, compared with 23,000 on Instagram, even though the la er has been around twice as long, data from the analytics firm Social Blade shows.
Brandon Conway, 22, was lying in bed one night this summer at his family’s ca le farm outside Athens, Ga., when he posted his first TikTok, showing him singing Michael Jackson in a karaoke bar parking lot.
Within a day, the video had soared past 9 million views, he’d gained 170,000 followers, and he’d started dreaming of life beyond his DJ night shi s at a local Italian grill.
“I just want to be the next person” to make it big, he said.
TikTok viewers said they love the app because its algorithmic recommendations predict their interests and take away the anxiety of choice.
And the personality-driven format encourages authenticity and intimacy; many videos are designed as if the creator is speaking directly through their screen.
Maribel Martinez, a 24-year-old mother in New Port Richey, Fla., went viral on TikTok a er she dressed up as the superstrong Luisa from the Disney movie ‘Encanto’, gaining 2 million followers within three months.
“You build this audience that tends to be more like a second family, and your followers really go in for you, they defend you,” she said.
“But the hate we get, the rumors, the lies that get told about us – it can spread like wildfire.”
And keeping people’s a ention can be a challenge, creators said.
No one knows exactly what the algorithm rewards or punishes, leading many of them to regularly recalibrate what they talk about or how they behave in hopes of garnering its blessing.
Several creators shared folk theories about the app’s most virally promising hashtags, topics or trends.
The mystery around how the algorithm chooses winners and losers fuels a constant sense of competitive anxiety.
Some creators said their connections to their followers seemed more disposable and easily replaced than on other sites, leaving them feeling always one swipe away from irrelevance.
“The thing about a trend is: It only trends for a few months, if you’re lucky,” said one TikTok creator with more than 10 million followers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to affect their relationship with the company.
“People get excited: ‘I got 200,000 followers!’ They don’t realise, once that trend’s done, it’s like: What are they going to do next?”
Just as TikTok’s algorithm rapidly promotes certain videos, it can also silently downrank or ‘shadowban’ creators or videos for breaking its indiscernible rules, leaving many creators scrambling to proactively censor themselves.