Always interestings to know how other social media works!
As I wrote last year when TikTok released its 2022 recap, counting down the top-performing content illustrates just how disparate our individual experiences are on one of the most influential platforms of our age. What I’m seeing on TikTok isn’t necessarily what you’re seeing — and according to this recap, the overlap is slim between my For You page and the net average of all TikTok users. How do we make wide-ranging conclusions about an app where a consensus doesn’t exist? And what counts as “viral” on a platform where anyone can rack up half a million views and it would still be a drop in the bucket of attention and not at all representative of “what’s happening on TikTok”? (This spring I posted a video to TikTok that went “viral” — it has had no long-term impact. All that happened was a bunch of people came across it at one point.)
That context laid the groundwork for the claim that followed: that teens are suddenly really into Osama bin Laden because his infamous and violent “Letter to America” manifesto “surged in popularity” on TikTok. But the so-called surge was actually just a trickle: prior to media coverage and the recirculation of the video on Twitter, a few hundred TikToks contained a #lettertoamerica hashtag, amounting to 1.8 million views, according to The Washington Post. Again, it’s an imperfect metric. How many of those viewers watched for more than a few seconds before scrolling past? Does using the hashtag mean you’re co-signing bin Laden?