“All the super famous guys, like the Hype House-I feel like they’re all like the same men, in terms of their build and their hair and their race,” he said. Sophomore Kyle Reyes also experienced a similar feeling after scrolling past the regularly promoted influencers on his For You page. “Not everyone wants to look like that, but then I feel like seeing it over and over drills it into our minds that that’s what we’re supposed to look like,” she said. For senior Hannah Schendel, who herself boasts close to 30,000 followers on TikTok, the repetitiveness is more than noticeable. The trickle-down effect? When ordinary teens scroll through their For You page, the uniform beauty standards scream out at them. Similarly, the Sway House, a content house consisting of 16-to 22-year-old boys, is perhaps most well-known for videos of the creators working out without shirts on and showcasing toned abs. The Hype House, boasting alumni such as Charli D’Amelio, the most followed creator on TikTok, and Addison Rae, the second most followed creator on TikTok, had a photoshoot with its original 14 members-all of whom were white and fit a narrow, constrained definition of beauty. There’s no better place to witness the beauty standards promoted and perpetuated by TikTok than “content houses,” collaborative groups of popular creators working together to create videos. Yet, regardless of intention, the end result is the same: the For You page, the heavily visited and viewed centerpiece of TikTok, defaults to promoting content from skinny, attractive and young creators. The justification issued by the company is that such content is highly vulnerable to cyber-bullying and the creator-rather than the content-is the focus of the video. “Ugly facial looks (not limited to: disformatted faces, fangs, lack of front teeth, senior people with too many wrinkles, obvious facial scars) or facial disformities (not limited to: eye disorders, crooked mouth disease and other disabilities)” was another. Last year, “The Intercept” published a document given to TikTok moderators advising them on content to restrict: “Abnormal body shape, chubby, have obvious beer belly, obese, or too thin (not limited to: dwarf, acromegaly)” was one rule. In the past, TikTok has admitted to blocking videos created by individuals with facial disfigurements, autism and Down Syndrome from appearing on the For You page.
The “tailored” TikTok algorithm, however, belies a darker reality. “Part of the magic of TikTok is that there’s no one For You feed-while different people may come upon some of the same standout videos, each person’s feed is unique and tailored to that specific individual.” “This feed is powered by a recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user,” ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, said in a press release explaining the app’s algorithm. This For You page is one of the main draws of the app. It’s easy to create an account, and an endless stream of videos will appear on a custom-tailored For You page, even if a user doesn’t choose to follow anyone. So just why is TikTok so popular, and why is it so much more popular than other social media apps?įor one, TikTok content is easily digestible. With over 2 billion downloads and 800 million active users, the app is the most downloaded app in the App Store. The app has become so ubiquitous among younger generations that the platform, which consists of five to 60 second videos of everything from comedy sketches to dance routines, rarely bears explanation.
Mia Knezevic, Haley Pflasterer, Forum and Photo Editor, News Editor | May 24, 2021
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