When TikTok trends go bad
The difference between hopping on a trend and piling on a creator.
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There's always too much niche TikTok drama rattling around in my brain, but today I’m writing about two discussions that I think highlight a bigger cultural problem on the app. —Kate
You could be forgiven for thinking that TikTok drama is just rich 17-year-olds breaking up and getting back together—that’s what makes headlines and posts on accounts like TikTok Room. I’ve been trying to think of a better word for the, in my opinion, way more interesting discussions and disagreements happening underneath all that. The For You Page has a unique ability to throw unsuspecting users headfirst into the middle of an established community’s intense back-and-forth. When that happens to me, I go digging until, suddenly, I know everything there is to know about accusations of racism against a creator in the autistic community or a short film director’s claim that NowThis and Netflix ripped off her idea for a film.
Today I woke up thinking about Joey Cassanova and @briaalanaa, who both created TikTok trends that escaped their control. For Cassanova, it was the gunshot trend in which the sound of each shot marks a hardship in your life, and Bria, the “fax, no printer” video that has been widely imitated, including by Doja Cat.
Almost every popular TikTok trend starts with one video that users then replicate or add their own twist to, facilitating a whisper-down-the-lane effect that leaves the end product almost totally separate from its origin. Doja Cat’s take on Bria’s video is literally just guttural sounds, but everyone knows exactly what it refers to.
This type of virality actually goes back to YouTube in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The platform used to have a “video response” option, where users could reply to any video they were watching with their own thoughts or their own version. I remember Molly Templeton’s video “dear body” was the inspiration for a number of video responses in which people wrote their own love letters to themselves.
The difference was that these responses would appear under the original video and, if I remember correctly, would have to be approved by the original video’s creator before they were visible there. (Don’t quote me on this, the feature was discontinued in 2013 and as we established yesterday, I’m almost 30.) On TikTok, it's common to imitate or reference a trend without formally interacting at all with the video that inspired it—iykyk. But sometimes, these contextless responses are disrespectful or hurtful to the original creators.
In an interview this week with EJ Dickson of Rolling Stone, Cassanova described how his original gunshot video—which divulged his experiences with child abuse, the loss of family members, and PTSD—has been carelessly co-opted by users ostensibly mocking themselves for never enduring any genuine hardships (instead citing things like having to wait for new music from Rihanna), and ultimately just making light of Cassanova’s experience. “They saw it, they stole it, and they ignored the pain behind the story,” he said.
Though it's the impact that matters here and not the intent, many of the people who made versions of his video probably don't even know where it originated. The same cannot be said for Bria.
Her tone of voice, the distinct phrases she uses, the bizarre choreography of the man in the background of the original video—all of this was ripe for parody. The first, or at least most popular, video mocking Bria was made by @_samueladrian_. It escalated into a heated Instagram Live between the two creators and then Sam’s temporary ban from TikTok for bullying, but he’s far from the only person to imitate it.
The conversation around who "owns" a TikTok trend has always been thorny. Is it the person who made the original video, or the community that ends up shaping it? What if, as so often happens, a person of color made the video and white people co-opted it? If your contribution to a trend looks more like a pile-on or has been called out as harmful, then I think the answer is simple: don’t be a dick.
Recommended in this post: EJ Dickson’s interview with Joey Cassanova, Molly Templeton’s “dear body” YouTube video, not being a dick.