Transcription
Tik Tok has always been like R bleached de pigz concocted algorithmically colonized. We've been watching the snow succubi schlop the ever living Aura out of short form algorithm since his curation. Guys, it's time to stop the conversation. Tik Tok was getting the best, huh? And obviously, it's a cheap captain of black Affairs. First Command: not nonchalant dreadhead cornbread pink hair person, South Sudan manin, the biggest hoe of Canadian politics. You know that every once in a while, I have to act as the noticer.
Let me first get across though that Tik Tok is not as nebulous as it sounds. No matter what the unks still using Facebook say, let them live in Bliss. Facebook is such a wholesome Community for 70-year-olds with dental benefits. Grouping Tik Tok as a whole would be to categorize billions of views a month under a racial reference which spans across multiple genres. I mean, in August 2024, Tik Tok hit 1 billion viewers. So to define a whole diaspora—including creators from South Africa, Kenya, Korea, Japan, Brazil, India—by commodifying a diverse array of genres, black creators, SL viewers popular, what they're watching and how they consume it just wouldn't make sense. Wouldn't make sense at all.
I mean, there's geek, nerd, anime, cosplay—whatever you want to call it. Tik Tok is occupied by amazing cosplayers, fantastic editors, and very hot F like do they make y'all in the beautiful Factory? The 10 out of 10 Heavenly women Creator simulator device—that's where y'all are made. There's soop pooly Tik Tok. Where do you find Reliable Progressive news encompassing intuitive and intelligent arrays of voices? I actually started with before I got banned 90 times. We'll get to that later though.
Dancing Tik Tok, underground Tik Tok, edit talk, book talk—you could really go Niche and say hopecore Tik Tok, spiritual Tik Tok, shift talk, and Roblox talk. Dress to impress, dress to impress pose four, dress to impress pose five, dress to impress pose six. I mean, there's even a convoluted side of Tik Tok dedicated to a particular video game in which viral videos on Tik Tok crossover and empower roleplay by using black instances of trauma seen in drill rap to parody gang shootings because some guy named Trayvon was shot up at a digital house party.
Gu weird in the do. Niche black content, especially on Tik Tok, comes in all shapes, forms, and sizes. It doesn't fit into one binary. The only thing that really interlinks us most is the most beautiful thing in the world—racism. Racism, racism, racism, racism. Yay! Man, I've been waiting all day for this—racism, the future, the future of the world! Woo yay!
Oh, you don't think it's beautiful? The story of the black Tik Tok artist will go on to cement the legacies of a number of notable Gen Z influencers, wisdom with as much high fashion collabs, million-view videos, and certainly millions of more subscribers that talented man will garnish. Would never have had the platform he did if Tik Tok didn't exist. Bright political minds springing into the forefront of discourse, like JJ, consciously think peace tribe, and samoya wouldn't be around without Tik Tok.
Quirky, weird, funny, entertaining black people—I mean, Tik Tok has literally done the work of Hollywood in terms of introducing a diverse collective of black artist. I mean, when I say "ITG I R L" or pose like this, it's been months since I've given anything a 10 or threatened to drop new music by running at the camera and yelling "hello Christ" again, or even say the name "Lip Gloss" come here. People who have been tapped into the community on that app for its last 5-year runtime know exactly what I'm talking about. This app has so much lore, so much black joy, so much next generational talent.
But is our creativity a tool for entertainment? Is the black creator really seen in the 8-second algorithm? And if not, how does Tik Tok prioritize the Creator? Stay with me now—I'm sure we've all heard the story of Charlie Demilio stealing a dance from a young black woman, cementing her platform as Tik Tok's most followed artist.
For Parks of black and white content creation show us a clear parallel on prejudice we have yet to fully unpack. At the end of the day, is our culture on Tik Tok.com expendable? I mean, obviously, not. Black people run the music trends dating all the way back from baby Santana to KY laay to modern-day Tissa. Korean black people run the online trends from the comment sections backwards. Culture of utilizing AAVE—y'all co-opted black vernacular. Goofy and marginalized artists across all applicable slur lines have surely had to thank Tik Tok for a number of their come-up stories. Aaliyah interludes, eccentric fits, started off with her just being real on Tik Tok.
Kab went from a factory worker to the most watched short-form content creator ever. Saucy Santana, material material gr—you can get niche and say Ro Ramen. A number of other video essayists, Mustangs of a crouton underground rap, including Chris, iaz, Pink Pantheris, worst life dancers like atin Nasha, funny people like Karma pill, musicians like devilish bri, gaptooth masal fire, and this is only like a third of a list of people. I know you could go on and on and on and on.
At least in my pink waterfall, now imagine me as the Sphinx at the gates of rhetorical Nirvana. I'm here to ask you some questions. You may not be satisfied with an answer; you may not even get an answer. But the utility of Tik Tok needs to be discussed since Tik Tok is still an app developing and growing even beyond what I or anyone believed expected back in 2020.
Please don't take me as definitive while I'm talking; try to have a conversation with me, please. I don't bite. Have this internal dialogue. We could have a conversation. Again, it's been two whole years since I've been a consistent Tik Tok content creator. The algorithm has evolved without me. In fact, I'm bigger on YouTube now than I ever was on Tik Tok—in about 9k subscribers. Help us, help us.
I've even been a YouTuber for the same amount of time I've been a Tik tocker. Black art on Tik Tok is carried by thousands of individual creative minds. To slap a label on all black art ever created and summarize it in vanity is not the purpose of this video. I'm simply a creator that wants to center experiences, people, and vibes I find amusing, entertaining, or educational and to talk about it on camera while looking like a [__] is fun! Did you forget how to have fun, my child?
It's 6:00 p.m. The sun is setting and you haven't even had your seven hugs needed, my dear gas. Come here, sponsored by worm. I also believe, however, that my grievances are indicative of real problems that real barriers of internet moderation and centralization bring to the black creator diaspora.
So be deir, grab your Corvette Corvette, Riz your theory, and wife nonchalant dreadhead. It's time to MOG this app. Now there's a specific intersection with the internet, black art, and algorithmization that we have to delve into today. The glaring gaps between glaring principles and inequitable practices are filled with subtler forms of discrimination that give the illusion of progress and neutrality, even as coded inequity makes it easier and faster to produce racist outcomes.
This quote by Ruha Benjamin comes from Race and Technology she El: to the manufactured forms of racism and algorithmic bias structurally manifested from societal normativity in order to highlight how codes can be racist in themselves. Remember that humans make codes. Humans drive algorithms. And as indifferent as we think technology is on a philosophical level, actually we don't really think it's that indifferent.
There are a lot of studies pertaining to how robots could have like some type of race after technology looks at the social dimensions of the data sciences, algorithmic discrimination, machine bias. I got interested in it because a few years ago I was noticing these headlines around so-called racist robots. There seemed to be surprise around this idea that technology is not neutral.
So what the book tries to do is not only look at emerging technologies but the longer history of science and technology as embedded in a social context. A few years ago, there was a viral video of two friends using an automated soap dispenser and the soap wouldn't come out with the individual with darker skin because darker skin absorbs light. So if it's infrared technology, it's not going to work as effectively.
And so use this kind of lower tech example to get us thinking about more complex systems like our Criminal Justice System, our health care system, education system, where a lot of these institutions are outsourcing human decisions and turning to risk assessment tools. An indifferent tool can still have racist connotations in its application.
See, algorithms inherently, whether you like it or not, categorize artists based off of a myriad of interconnected moderational coding. One of these boxes of algorithmic filtration includes gender. In a paper called "Gendering Algorithms in Social Media," Edward, Adam, Roger, and Bart tackle how backwards the idea of internet categorization can be in relation to gender bias.
Online, social media platform providers use users' traits—including name, age, and gender—to improve user experience and personalized online behavioral advertising. By knowing user's characteristics, corporations can target or exclude certain groups more efficiently, tailor their services to certain users, and increase the time they spend on the platform.
In such a way, profiling makes marketing more precise and effective. However, a growing concern is the increasing use of opaque inferential analytics that reveal sensitive user attributes that serve attention economies and that may reinforce existing biases, which, although not explicit, can be very influential.
A reoccurring bias is gendered stereotyping. Gendered stereotyping refers to the practice of ascribing to an individual specific attributes, characteristics, or roles by reason of their membership in the social group of women or men. However, gendered stereotyping is a complex process that, although grounded in strong beliefs of what a gender is and should be, is both used and understood in too simplistic a manner.
I mean, gendered bias is the reason why a lot of toxic men's internet spaces continue to grow. Algorithms inherently feed into what you watch from beginning to end, by creating a space for misogynistic thought. Men like Andrew Tate can ride the algorithm's good graces in terms of retention and develop a following through the same toxic ideations of other men surrounding him online.
I mean through this past year, even though he's been banned off of a myriad of apps, he's still somehow taken over Tik Tok and Instagram short-form spaces. I mean, if you are a boy enjoyer of gym, philosophical, or of the stoic rhetoric, chances are you've had to see this Rufus if he did Kaio Ken and never met a red-haired bad.
So there is indeed a gendered bias which makes content creation intensely harder for black fems in relation to content creation. Even black men can have an Asis, and I have reason to believe this is purposeful.
Now for this section, I'm going to dissect the experience of the black creator along with codified bigotry pertaining to gender and race, using individual stories, research papers, and my own understanding of the internet. Our ability to examine biases towards black users and creators within the Tik Tok algorithm itself is limited, and thus we focus this work on the perceptions of black creators.
However, plenty of existing work has identified and labored to mitigate biases in algorithms like those powering social media platforms. For example, Harrison conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses to identify populations that are most likely to experience content moderation across a variety of social media platforms including Tik Tok.
They found that black users, transgender users, and users who promote conservative politics experience disproportionate removal of their social media content compared to other populations in their sample. Let me say that again: black users, trans users, and conservatives.
Now, what about a black thought is inherently as upsetting as a conservative thought? A guy just going like "Oh, I'm a Nazi?" The balance of existence on the app of Tik Tok is kept in check by white content creators who have been centered since the beginning. The reason why the initial story of Tik Tok is so white is that the black creators on there were prohibited by other apps.
In the new age of Tik Tok though, anyone can go viral. And not to say this couldn't always happen, but that phrase "anyone can go viral" takes away from the very real grievances of platform racism based on the app.
Outside of studying marginalized groups, multiple works have studied the experience of Tik Tok users more generally. For instance, Lee studied user perceptions of the Tik Tok algorithm. They find that many users perceived the algorithm to accurately reflect their multifaceted interests with little effort while some users needed to make additional efforts to shape their for you page outside of typical engagements with content.
Multiple participants found that their feed lacked diversity. Interestingly, one white user in the study noted that they made a deliberate effort to search and like content from black creators and other creators of color, which helped to diversify their feed.
Explore algorithm folk theories, identifying a commonly held theory which they call identity strainer theory, in which users believe content is actively suppressed based on marginalized identities such as race and ethnicity, body size and physical appearance, ability status, or LGBTQ identity. They further proposed the concept of algorithmic representational harm to describe the harm that occurs when users embody these identities.
I really need you to understand how [__] up it feels to be a black creator, giving your all to your content, knowing that the algorithms are literally working against you. I have seen multiple black creators recently who have theorized, tested, and proved that not only does the algorithm read the color of your skin, but it will also give palm-colored creators more views per like than if you are brown-skinned.
I already know there's going to be multiple people in the comments that are like deny deny deny, but like I said, it's been tested and proven by multiple creators. And then this whole [__] with the Black Panther red carpet happened. And if you're not sure what I'm talking about, they had like no black female creators invited to that carpet—not even the ones that are like way up there who have done several other press events.
And the ones who did get invited were invited the day of. It's just so discouraging that you can fight tooth and [__] nail to earn your spot. You could work twice as hard and be three times as talented and still not get half the recognition of your white counterparts just because you're black.
I've already talked about this before, but black creators statistically get paid 30% less than their white counterparts of like the same size. And it's like we talk and talk and talk about this [__] and nothing changes. Like, what is it going to [__] take when you know the algorithms are already working against you? You're going to get paid less and you won't be invited to the same events that your white counterparts will.
It's really [__] hard to keep wanting to do this. In another general study on Tik Tok content creators, Thomas and Key surveyed content creators to better understand their experience with hate speech and other toxic people behavior, including stalking, toxic comments, and impersonation.
Among their findings, 23% of their participants reported being the target of hate speech, bullying, or harassment always or often. What Tik Tok has done is regulate the moderator as law, coding it to flag harmful behavior, then act like it's not doing anything because the moderation system works across the board in the same way with all the creators. Supposedly the problem is black people might have different ways of speaking.
Whiteness works with more than just a skin tone. Yes, the algorithm can read skin tone, but the algorithm also picks up on speech patterns. So if we want the Philly dances, if we want the Cali dances, if we want the New York dances, we should be able to have a system that moderates its slang too without the need to police it. You see, content moderation extends to language, and language has colloquialism with race.
If we want black people on this app, we're going to have to build a system that can account for the English language it speaks without kicking it out. I'm sure you've been scrolling the For You page and came across some Philly dancers, some Milwaukee songs, New York Fashion, Atlanta girls with the moon boots. We kind of got a swag to how we walk, and I think you'd be surprised to find out that something as minutely different as voice and speech patterns are being flagged as inappropriate in the algorithm for black users.
One contributing factor to these disproportionate removals could be the use of AAVE among black content creators and social media users. Prior research shows black social media users are more likely to have their speech classified as hate speech or otherwise offensive speech by content moderation systems. More likely to be classified as negative sentiment in sentiment analysis systems, have higher word error rates in speech-to-text captioning, and broadly reported to have poor performance on natural language processing systems in general.
This issue is particularly concerning for content moderation and speech-to-text transcription, which both play a role in online video content creation and sharing. While the propriety nature of Tik Tok prevents much of these types of analysis of their platform, it is well established that these anti-black biases can exist in machine learning systems like those powering Tik Tok.
Firstly, accepting the neutrality of Tik Tok and its current form as an undecided algorithm would be to solidify the existence of racism as a norm on this app. With black content creators being so prevalent in the background—be it in its songs, white creators lip-sync the trends, people dance to—or the fashion that content creators outside of Black Culture mimic, we can't hide from the fact that there is a presence. The moderation system is policing it, and as a result, black creators suffer and white creators benefit from not having aspects of their culture like their voice, their tone of speech, skin, or their hair moderated by Tik Tok.
This brings me to the concept of being a black creator. One thing I love a lot about black creatives is how well they combat a normative veil of subjectivity. The aspects of black identity come with in a social sense. You know, although aspects like gendered bias and social scrutiny keep a lot of normal everyday people far, far, far, far, far away from the aspect of even like wanting to be a creator because it's like so cringe in their head.
They have to combat this thing of like, "Oh, I'm posting online, everyone's posting online." These Tik Tok creators are destroying the idea of molds on the internet by being themselves. Like across niche communities on Tik Tok, notably lelay princess, psycho, and with other black FS leading the charge, black people flood to these niches in the same way a lot of older black folk from Gen Z found community on Facebook talking about Dragon Ball Z, Roblox, and black culture, or on Tumblr talking about Lord or One Direction, W PTHS, Backyard Again.
I'm seeing the same problems of cringe subjectively placed on them though. You know, people who don't fit the characteristics of what they should be on the internet. The black fems who are cosplayers, influencers, or notably in genres with popular white women will always see a barrage of backlash more specific to video-sharing platforms.
Emma Maguire examines how expressions of black girlhood become viral, profitable, and appropriated commodities through a case study of the platform Vine. McGuire uses the example of black teenager Kayla Newman, username Peaches Monroe, who created the viral phrase "eyebrows on fleek" in a Vine video that received over 116 million views.
"Hi, my name is Pe Monroe and most people know me from starting to catch raise eyebrows on fleek. Fleek means it's on point, like it looks good, like now my eyebrows are on fleek. It took a week probably for like the celebrities to get a hold of it. I was on Twitter and I seen people kept tagging me, so I click on it and I seen that Christina Milian and Nicki just argued about pretty on fleek. People all in the comment section just had my name. How can you argue about this? And she's actually the creator of Fleek, and you need to pay her. And why aren't you guys adding her and tagging her? And I'm just like, 'cause I don't say anything.' And actually, by the time they were done, nobody was talking about pretty on fleek.
So, I saw a few brands use fleek. I know Forever 21 for sure. Fleek was like on one of their shirts. H&M said Fleek had that on their shirt. I know a few hair companies, and I feel like if it wasn't for me in that video, that it wouldn't be so popular at the time as it is now, or it would just be later on down the line."
The phrase went on to be used for advertising and sold on merchandise by myriad companies and celebrities. While others built social and monetary capital from Newman's phrase, Newman attempted unsuccessfully to gain intellectual property rights to it.
Maguire argues that Newman's struggle to gain creative ownership of the phrase is part of a greater history of exploitation of black cultural production for the profit of non-black individuals.
On top of examples of anti-blackness—like the treatment of lip gloss—black fems are still leaving the app due to these conditions every day. "I will not put myself in a box. I speak how I speak. I react to things the way that I react to things. And regardless of how you like it or perceive it, that is who I am. That is me. I wasn't put on this Earth to perform, especially not for no white people. I was put on this Earth to live unapologetically for my black ass self."
Which is why I'm forever grateful for creators like Karma, Car Miss Joe, Sarah Luger, Not Father, Maria Cava, random black girl, and con. I might have got some of those names wrong, but y'all keep my hope of quirky black creative women running the internet alive.
What the algorithm does is amplify everyday commonalities of feminine projection onto these women. So I don't want to bash white women for the sake of uplifting black women. You know, white women may still be objectified heavily by a male audience for fitting into beauty standards. Insert Livy Dun meme—like being a black person on this internet, I go more than I get more than enough. So I can't imagine what y'all go through.
I can just throw a bonnet on, throw on some glasses, and I'm pretty and photogenic for the AL gr while black fems are expected to fulfill an unjust societal beauty standard in myriad different ways. They get hated on when their hair is too short, shamed for the complexion of their skin, and shunned for participating in interests they find joy in.
So make sure to like, comment, and interact with FS whenever you can. They really get at the worst. Thirdly, I got tired of standing that I'm not touching you racism problem, which is widely spread throughout music talk.
My first example that comes to mind is Diddy and PID zilba on Tik Tok. And of course, this problem can be thrown onto creators who have profited in the participation of Black Culture because to center yourself in a black genre can have certain effects that we need to talk about.
Let's talk about a chat. Ever since the inception of Tik Tok, black musical artists have been present in the form of Tik Tok sounds, and organically a lot of artists have sprung up from the marketing of their own music and their own videos. Pink panther is with her obscure appeal, COA Ray with her twerking videos, Aaliyah's interlude with her viral hit "It Girl" along with black men like Chris, Yas, Jace, all of Opium.
Lucky—that’s a joke; that’s a joke. I know Travis Scott was already famous, okay? That's a joke. But this aspect of self-marketing from like a very down-to-earth personal Tik Tok creator kind of shtick has been commodified.
These same influencers making their own songs and making their own videos scarcely go viral as much, and industry giants rely on everyday Tik Tokers in order to market their music. So influencers like Diddy Bop make a lot of money based on promoting and doing ad runs for media companies who want to hire and push these artists. And it's not like Diddy Bop is just like a young broke kid; he really makes money off this method.
“Well, we say we control the culture of Tik Tok.” White faces take up the marketing roles of Tik Tok's branding. More and more content creators like Diddy Bop are springing up even in the musical category. Ian being one of the newest white avatars of black culture at this point. Working with Lyrical Lemonade and Lotti got his start off of marketing on Tik Tok, with a lot of comments shocked to find out that the man who made sounds like he's from Atlanta is a little white boy in some glasses.
And it troubles me to know there's so much starving artist on the Tik Tok app specifically because of how easily accessible it is as an app of black creativity. And since there's not many avenues to market yourself in the real world, they’re forced to be undermined by white people who are worse than what they do but born with the ability to be praised for being white. You see that?
The "I'm not touching you" racism problem solidifies a barrier of neglect of white faces in black spaces. If Diddy Bop is dancing to black music wearing black clothes in a very nerdy white way, he becomes the awkward white kid. And just like that, he can shield the culture vulture allegations by playing small little be.
I mean, FaZe, the newest streaming group taking the world by storm, has even been spotted in sessions with him, which is wild when you consider the hundreds of other Tik Toks not deemed industry-friendly because they're black people making black music, which ends up with them getting less opportunities than Ian does.
Tik Tok also has a weird way of censoring pro-black tags or discourse. All of this just reminds me of like the long and complicated history of race on this [__] app. So in 2020, there was a massive problem with white creators stealing from black content creators.
And also back in 2020, Tik Tok would take your video down with the quickness. Every time I opened this app, I had a violation. And when I say take your video down, I mean, you know they would take black people's videos down primarily. And race baiting was huge in 2020 and 2021.
2021—I feel like that was the year of rage baiting on this app, especially when it came to race because a lot of the times at least back then, the only way that you could get views if you were a black content creator was to stitch a white content creator who were running around recklessly, and the app did not check them because Tik Tok don't be checking them.
And then in 2022, you had a lot of content creators who were trying to really educate about race—me being one of them, you know what I'm saying? And that was a dumpster fire. So many black content creators were getting banned. It felt like every other video of mine was me trying to get somebody's account back.
So literally, we had to code switch constantly. But yeah, when you see black people especially code switching and using words that you never even heard of, it's because y'all be banning us, 'cause you don't want to take accountability for your privileged existence—and I said what I [__] said.
Using Andre Brock's method of critical technoculture analysis, first developed to study black Twitter, Peterson examines two challenges on Tik Tok that directly engage race through visual and critical technoculture discourse analysis. To put these trends in context, Peterson documents surveillance challenges faced by black and other marginalized creators on Tik Tok.
One example is a Tik Tok video from black creator Ziggy Taylor documenting that Tik Tok's content moderation system labeled phrases "black support" and "black lives matter" in his bio as inappropriate, but not the term "white supremacy."
"Yeah, I'm fed up. I'm tired. I am a Neo. You can see it. Boom! Accepted. Fine. No issue. Let me delete it. I can say I'm anti—I'm not even going to say the word out loud, 'cause it irks me. Anti. Boom! Right here. You see it? Accepted? God forbid I typed this in. Let me get rid of that. Let me say word of the day. I'm a black man. What do you think it's going to say? Threat. I'm done.”
With greater context of racialized surveillance on Tik Tok, Peterson analyzes two Tik Tok challenges: the JoJo pose challenge, in which black creators recreate photos posing like individuals in their towns or schools who had openly promoted racist rhetoric to the song "Pose" by Apollo Fresh, and the Vogue challenge, in which black and brown Tik Tok creators edited themselves onto the cover of Vogue magazine to highlight the historical lack of diversity in its publication.
She proposes that these challenges counter-hegemonic narratives of black identity and are a form of digital dark surveillance or digital strategies to inverse power structures.
Under a system of racialized surveillance, some of the key findings of these works mirror findings of prior works on black experiences online, including concerns of appropriation and outsider mockery of black individuals, and stricter content moderation of black people.
However, some of the findings are also unique to video sharing or specifically Tik Tok. The scale of capital built from non-black individuals' appropriation and copying of black individuals on the platform and the inversion of anti-black power structures by black creators both are more unique to Tik Tok.
These unique elements suggest a greater analysis of black individuals' experience on Tik Tok is needed. Furthermore, these works complete their analysis by viewing Tik Tok content rather than engaging these creators.
"Hi everybody, my name is Mariam J. I'm 21 years old. I've been on the internet for about 4 years. Instagram is my main platform. I mostly do fashion content, beauty content, and yeah, I brought you on to discuss the challenges of training to creating, editing, and being a figure online. What was your content creation journey like?"
I would say I didn't go into it thinking that it was going to be a journey. I just kind of did it to do it, you know, just posting myself. But it seemed to get a lot of attention, you know, from the way I dress to, you know, my face. I think people really like the way I look. I get a lot of interaction from teenage girls mostly, so they kind of look up to me a bit when it comes to fashion, when it comes to beauty, like makeup, hair.
I just kept going on with that, still posting things that I want to post, showing everybody, you know, how I curate my outfits, how I style my hair—just simple stuff like that. And then slowly it just started getting traction. I would have some posts on Instagram, you know, blow up a little bit; some posts on Tik Tok blow up a little bit. And then I was like all over Pinterest, which most people, you know, recognize me from.
So yeah, my content creation journey was kind of the same, but to do it like so young, I have to give you like applause. My content creation started like three years ago at this point, like on Tik Tok, and then I started doing YouTube videos was two years ago. Definitely like the same thing, like posting—not really outfits—more so like a bunch of rants and funny videos and all that.
But it's funny because the internet's so small. Like, I saw your account I think like 2 years ago, and I think that's when I first saw you. And I saw you on Pinterest before that, and then when I saw your account on Instagram, it was like eight of my mutuals already followed you. It's like the content creation space online is very small, which makes sense because to have that many followers, not that many people are going to garnish that much followers, right?
But what you do— I have to applaud you for it because you are a big inspiration. And I love that with your experience working, you know, as a content creator, have you ever come into like a racist situation with the fan? Because I know it's happened a lot with— like that's happened a lot with me.
Specifically on Tik Tok when I was a Tik Tok creator, but it was basically like a lot of it was a lot of normative racism—like, you know, the microaggression comments. They evolve over the years. Like right now, it's like YNS and like crash out to describe black people.
But yeah, back then I was getting called all those Tik Tok stuff. In your experience, how was that like?
So yeah, definitely have gotten DMs, gotten comments—very, very hateful— you know, I'm sure you can understand too. You know, we're both dark-skinned, it seems like, we get targeted a little more than other people.
I had an instance where there were comments under this picture that like blew up; it got like 70,000 likes. And it was like, "Oh, she looks like a man," or "Oh!" Yeah, it was so—I was like, "Okay." And then a lot of people were like coming to my defense. I would obviously not—yeah, yeah. I would say that there are a lot more positive comments than the hateful ones, which I'm very appreciative of.
I love the people who follow me; they always come to my defense whenever they see some, you know, bull in the comments. I get comments like, you know, like she's too dark, comment like gorilla emoji comments, you know, that Cole comments calling me Cole.
And then I think especially the man comment stood out to me the most because it was like a dump of selfies of my stuff of myself, right? All of these like that I mentioned are coming from older men who told that, you know, "I can't tell if she's a girl or boy" in my comments.
And it's never wom. I never see that. It's never people my age; it's older men, which I find very interesting. But how I dealt with it, you know, we move. Like, I get DMs all the time, and I think just like if I were to focus on the negative ones, which there are, I would like you know, give them power, you know, give those comments power, give those situations power when there's so much positivity that comes with my platform and everything.
So yeah. On the other hand, have you ever come into like a race situation with like an app? 'Cause I know when I was on Tik Tok and even sometimes on YouTube, I'd get stried for I guess like maybe sometimes like the way I talk or like the A I used or like some kind of something I'd just get stried for, and I'd be like, "I didn't do anything here."
And that's actually how my first couple Tik Tok accounts got like banned off the face of the Earth. Inflammatory remarks when I was just talking about antiblackness. And the second one was literally because I showed my shoulders, and then they were like, "Oh, you're too revealing." But in your experience, how's it been like with you?
You know, I don't really talk in my content 'cause I am shy, like with talking that is a little scary for me. So I’ve never personally gone through a, you know, a racist situation with an app. But I do see, like what you said, a lot especially when the topics are, you know, about Palestine.
I have, I'm in college, you know, I’m 21; I am a part of the Student Justice for Palestine club, and their page got taken down about three or four times from—on Instagram, which is so insane 'cause no other club page has like ever experienced something like that.
And yeah, I just, it's just so—it feels very intentional; it doesn't feel like it's just, "Okay, this page just happened to get taken down three or four times." You know, for me personally, no. And I think it's probably because I kind of stay on the safer side—you know? I don't voice opinions that much if that makes sense.
This isn't written down, but I just kind of want to ask you, just 'cause the experience of being a content creator, I guess for us and like, you know, dark-skinned people, being able to have a normative entry into some kind of platform hasn't really existed outside of Hollywood for like the longest time.
So like we—this is a very new thing, like the concept of Micro Niche, micro internet influencers, like what they do online, their purpose, and all that. And I will say that's very exciting, right? And I'm very happy that someone like you is given like a platform and able to, I guess, do whatever—push your art in the world in whatever forms you want.
But in the experience of being a black content creator, what's the joy of it? Honestly, like I said before, it's my younger audience. You know, the DMs that I get— you know, these are teenage girls; we're like basically in the same age group.
Around, you know, I'm 21 a little older, but you know, 16, 17, 18-year-old talking about how I was such a huge inspiration for them. Like through seeing me on my platforms, they feel more confident about themselves. And then when it comes to dark-skinned black girls, you know, teenagers, I make them feel more confident, put themselves out there post themselves on the internet, dress how they would like.
They mentioned that part like, "Wow, you make me feel more confident about my skin. You make me feel more confident, like as a dark-skinned girl," which is so beautiful; like, it's really, you know, it really, really, really touches my heart.
So honestly, that's definitely the best part. Baby Ariel, Lisa and Ellen, Lauren Gray, Jacob Sartorius, Cameron Dallas, Christian Hatcher, Sab Sodus, Ary McKenzie— to be honest, I don't know a lot of these people but they've made a lot of money, and that money has some ramifications that we're going to get into and all that stuff.
A lot of these names would go on to cement lasting careers with millions of dollars and all. However, how they got to that fame is something that needs to be studied. I know it’s hard to believe, but the concept of voicing over music on camera was actually coined on Musical.ly and Dubsmash—one of them being of significance in a different way in accordance to its usage of the app, but essentially the same thing.
You load it up, you pick the song, you do the dance—easy enough. Usually, these videos would include some impressive camera work, movement, over a number of transitions.
However, for the sake of simplicity, we're going to start with Musical.ly and then talk about the utility of an app like Dubsmash to marginalized artists a little bit later. Musical.ly rose to prominence sometime in 2015, where the most popular short-form app by far was Vine and way behind it, Dubsmash.
You forget that at this time, this app was competing with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LeBron's Prime Facebook. Notably, Vine and Dubsmash were by far the more blacker apps. The minstrel effect didn't really work on Tik Tok in the same way as lip-syncing did for black creators on Musical.ly.
I defined minstrelcy very loosely and with grace. Minstrelcy is a performance for a white audience. Black people embodied for quick clicks. Think speed, Kai, Bruce, flight reacts, etc. Although Speed is becoming cool, I kind of have empathy for this kind of performance too. At the time, it seemed in the genre of entertainment, black artists thrived more algorithmically through self-degrading skits like King Bach did rather than entrancing clips like Speed and AM and Phase do right now.
Highlighted with the prominent rise of KingBach— we'll get into minstrelcy later though. Not to say that Musical.ly didn't have its fair share of cringe; it was very much a primer app in terms of its form, and Vine was the same app, but like cooler in a public sense.
It was not getting stomped on and defecated on and, you know, smashed as much. It had the cool kids. The cooler content creators were shifting digital content creation in very new and creative ways. On Vine, Musical.ly, in comparison, was always seen as an app for younger children.
And even though the ripple effects of these white content creators remain profoundly under-researched, it's evident that YouTube's digital monolith of content revolved around the idea of Musical.ly being cringe. We could see this with the millions of views people like RiceGum and Pyro Cynical garnished over their career.
I mean, they got houses and cars and Lamborghinis and expensive clothes off of his items. RiceGum was flexing that for a minute. A number of content creators doing commentary podcasts like Pyro Cynical, I Am Alex, RiceGum, and KSI may even owe their fame to the adjusting era of Musical.ly.
Most of these YouTubers literally went from roasting kids to selling them a legalized overdose for $4.99—shfo Prime. This affected Musical.ly's numbers too. Harvard case cites Musical.ly primarily targets at 13 to 18-year-old teens.
Now, I don't really listen to nepo babies, but I'm going to trust Harvard's resource just this one time. I kind of saw it for myself. So you got this one white kid— "Get her, get her done"—white kids and its marketing very much walk the walk.
Most of the boosted creators were kids under the age of 16, musicians, and girls that fawned over them. What happened afterwards was a crowd of very young fans came in that were basically fawning over these creators.
Now, Musical.ly was launched initially in 2014, and thankfully we have an interview with Alex Zhu, co-founder of Musical.ly, in order to expound the truths. According to him, "If you can bring people together—me before the Hello Kitty BDS some party."
What Alex couldn't foresee was the community that this would have sprung forth. "See, initially, our computer savvy guy just wanted to build an algorithm which educated the masses. At that time, I got an idea; it was a one big-ion-dollar idea I thought, which is to transform education and combine the idea of Kera and the idea of Twitter into one product: U making educational accounts first on mobile and bit-size short form so we reduce the barrier to content creation as well as content consumption for education.
Right? So in the end of the day, we hope everyone can post educational contents, share the knowledge, and everyone can learn on this platform. It became a multiple billion-dollar business, but it turned to be a complete failure.”
Yeah, and then you know, we analyzed what are the lessons learned from this failure. We must, you know, learn from the failure and try to find a new direction. But what would really cement its popularity was Gen Z.
See, there was a number of apps that were popular with Gen Z: Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, Flappy Bird, House Party— and no, I'm not laughing about the Flappy Bird part. You wouldn't believe me, but these phones with the original downloads were going for like $6,000 Canadian dollars.
These apps laid down very important frameworks. Instagram taught us hot people can lead to a lot of clicks and likes and interaction and engagement. Snapchat taught us personal connection to people's lives can be monetized on a day-to-day for short-form basis.
Vine taught us maybe we can combine all three of these things in a short-form content creation style, which would turn into creating niche micro internet influencers. The "everyone's in on it" internet moments can thus be talked about on the Town Square in these people's comments.
We can collectively meme funny sounds, the Vine booms, maybe come up with our own laugh with every scroll, watch regular people become stars. It was the wild west of short-form content creation, but Musical.ly's rise didn't come until they, in the same way as Vine appealed to Gen Z.
Musical.ly understood engaging with younger generations is a way to cement your legacy as a product. Creators like Baby Ariel, Jacob Sartorius, and Cameron Dallas organically became the algorithm's Justin Bieber.
By the way, all these creators were under 16, Jacob Sartorius being 13 at the time of his blowup. There's a lot to say about what interaction and fame and all that dopamine can do to a young mind, but Jacob Sartorius took and ran with kind of the same marketing model that Justin Bieber did.
Being a young white musician was a different experience in the social zygis to Justin Bieber though according to his time. I've been around for both of their blowups and Tik Tok unlocked a whole different type of paparazzi.
See, when you're posting on a day-to-day basis rather than dropping videos or little music videos or doing appearances here and there and relying on the paparazzi and press to be your marketing, you essentially can be contacted with at any time in a parasocial matter in the algorithm, which makes backlash so much more harsh, hate campaigns so much more person reifying and all that.
Justin Bieber's publicity was seen in YouTube videos, Ellen interviews, paparazzi photos, and footages while Jacob Sartorius's happened in a digital vacuum.
Instead of mainstream industry coverage, Jacob Sartorius relied on Musical.ly's young base of content creators and publicity be it in the form of hating content creators or common engagement constantly popping up in an algorithmic feed gave a different level of parasociality with the audience.
This was the first niche micro internet influencer to break into the mainstream. Well, not really. I'd kind of say that was like Soja Boy, but like Jacob Sartorius would become a visual blueprint for a number of other content creators who looked like him in a variety of different ways.
And I tend to go lighter on him because he was like 12. But remember that black and POC content still thrived on Musical.ly. It was just mostly centralized.
What do you mean by that term? What do you mean by centralized? I mean like watered down—like McDonald's in downtown South Dakota, watered down, dry.
Tai be popular rappers at the time like Future would see his hit "Mask Off" by Future be made into trends in the form of dances on Musical.ly. And a lot of camera tricks you see in the current Tik Tok age were invented on Musical.ly too. You know those hand movements they was doing? That was all Musical.ly dancing.
But dancing as a trend I'm more relate to artists like Ayo and Teo. I remember them popularizing a lot of things like the Quan—like you know that pipe it up [__] that? Yeah, dating all the way back to 2000, soldier boy.
The way I look at it, building a community is very similar to running an economy. So there are a lot of economic policies you can learn in order to run the community. Building a community from scratch is like you just discovered a new land and you want to build an economy, you want to build a population, and you want people from Europe to migrate to your country.
And Instagram is Europe. Facebook is Europe. How can you do it? Alex got his initial wish though, and the European content creators did come flooding in. Creators like Jacob Sartorius were not really that big until they moved over to Tik Tok and created that following.
What Alex Zhu and the founders of Musical.ly did was essentially create a new type of content creator economy. See, the emergence of content creator economies inadvertently creates new ways for niche micro-influencers to tackle the medium on a certain app.
Tik Tok's not the first industrial giant to create one of these online retention extraction modules. We saw how on Vine, the creator economy liked to popular white stars to emerge to prominence across apps like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.
This method was so successful it helped gentrify LA. And although these initial content creator economies didn't pay well initially, what they're useful for is clout or views.
See, the aspirations of most content creators span further than just recognition on the app that they're on. We forget for most big-name celebrities, Tik Tok is only just becoming a viable way of marketing. Initially, you need big names to break the mold—like Selena Gomez's run on Musical.ly inspiring big viners to migrate to flock to the app.
But your tester creators need to have faith that their foothold will be solid on your platform. So creating a model based off of potential and giving initial stars loads of clout makes people that look the same as them that are creatives and see this as a platform way to garnish more attention for the art—to segue into this app and that's marketing, babe.
It's your degree. Admittedly, this was my generation, but I was way too busy throwing ball and hoop and playing Roblox to keep up with anything other than YouTube and being beat for bringing home beans.
You know, it's just immigrant vibes, but Musical.ly was overly white, filled with adolescent children, and subjected to dunking videos from whatever bigoted minority phase could get its hand on that generation. Dubsmash was overwhelmingly black on the other end and with the same premise.
Most of Musical.ly's trends, be it the Young Thug "Thief in the Night" dance and a bunch of others, have been stolen, and this is still a prominent issue to this day. There have been grievances and acts of rebellion against Tik Tok.
In fact, Dubsmash has actually rolled out services like paying for a creator message which helped black creators have a more stabilized income, which is always nice 'cause a lot of us aren't these people with Mercedes. Man, I'm telling you, it's a facade.
Now, online platforms and their current forms do contribute to disproportionate bans, restrictions, and bigoted engagement with marginalized artists, but how much of this is the app and how much of this is the people? After all, it's the person that has to hop on their phone and type out that comment. Stitch a black video without any reference to the dance. Use slang they have no business using.
I'm saying we have to try to consume with some sort of consciousness. Tik Tok is becoming a Mecca of black culture, and although you can have opinions on your creators, we've watched people like Aaliyah's Inter go from our For You page to our TV.
We watch Wisdom go from our For You page to runways. We watch Kab go from our For You page to the most followed, at least for a while. And we continue to watch as the new generation invents trends, dances, sound bites, and memes in this little pocket dimension.
This is exciting. Having avenues for a globalized exchange of art is exciting. I've literally seen some of the funniest, coolest, most engaging moments across the diaspora, whether it was C China, a British 19-year-old 1v9 billion, all of the red-pilling men trying to [__] shame her and coming out on top.
All we do is CH. We R about OP. You don't even have these be to niy. Whether it was 10K cash literally making us all like during the whole pandemic. Whether it was the cast of MHA being remixed to a then trending rap song, shout out to pixel drink in the black anime community.
I've seen a lot of art, and I'm very thankful for that. Thankful for the creators who go through the gratuitous time of scripting, editing, and providing for me to see it on my phone for like three seconds and decide if it's good or not.
I know it can be easy to mindlessly scroll. It's easy to forget the person behind the screen is not a real content creator subjected to algorithmic means of feasibility. Sometimes I scroll so long I start to figure out what consciousness feels like.
But we have to think carefully about how our algorithm choices and code will disproportionately affect the future of black artists and art. How can we create a better atmosphere for the future of content creators who inhabit this app and any other online?
Just like I said before, the love is disproportionately felt, and sometimes I can get caught up in a hate comment while ignoring the hundreds of others supporting the video and the thousands of likes accumulating from the video.
It doesn't stop the fact though that those comments still remain. Though if I could read out every single one and vindicate the author's IP addresses, I may be tempted by the fourth African comment.
But more so than the comment, the algorithm, the internet, and the creator are more than this pocket dimension. We're affected by this algorithm; we make decisions based on the swing of metrics.
My thumbnails can change; my presentation style stays generally the same in terms of script and editing content. I may take risks, but I become the niche of turb, and that niche has asterisks of black which I'll have to consider when trying to be seen amongst white content creators who may be prioritized or deemed more suitable to aloric standards to the line of code processing both of our videos.
So don't be afraid to shuttle all your favorite creators. Engage, repost, all of that. What I want to see is everyone comment a couple of their favorite black ones. My personal ones getting me through the autumn season are Karma Car, a university student who's funny as hell; Think Peace Tribe, a really good activist voiced from Atlanta; Mustangs of a crouton, funniest light skin on the planet; Devilish bried; Ctia star; C. China; Pixel drink; Lelay; Hemlock Springs; Tony Bravo; Shrex; Dumpster; Anaya; Cash; White Male Ego; and a blunt.
ARA wo, give me your favorites! I want them commented. I want there to be a list of names pertaining to Black creators. Tell me what you love about them. Let us share in the communal joy of creativity.
Thank you so much for watching my video. Movie is this Saturday at 6:00 p.m. Discord is in BIO. Now sub to the Patreon to help me! This one was a really fun one to make. I left Tik Tok around like 2ish years ago; haven't really gone back because of a lot of censorship and all that.
So it was nice to like go back and dig up some old trauma. Say I love you to all the Tik Tok people and all that. Give my little flowers to that app 'cause not that much people know how much black, how much black content comes out of that app.
And as always, I love y'all. Have an amazing day. I'll see you next time!