Muni Long‘s “Hrs and Hrs” has become enjoyably ubiquitous in the last three months. Like so many hits, it attracted the interest of TikTok users first — the sticky R&B ballad has now been used in more than 1 million videos on the app. From there, it moved quickly to …
Read More »TikTok's School Shooting Hoax Shows How Misinformation on the App Is Out of Control
Every day seems like it brings a new moral panic or hoax on TikTok. Earlier this year, it was “National Rape Day,” a “challenge” that supposedly originated among misogynists on TikTok but was later found to be totally baseless; last year, it was the Wayfair sex trafficking conspiracy theory, which …
Read More »Sugar Babies Are Taking to TikTok to Skewer Their Daddies
TikTok is not exactly the most sex-positive app. The platform tends to censor terms like “sex” and “stripping” (leading content creators to come up with clever workarounds in their captions, such as “seggs” and “skripping”), and sex workers often complain about being booted from the app for no good reason. …
Read More »Her Sex-Positive Video Went Viral. Why Did TikTok Keep Taking It Down?
On the evening of Tuesday, June 15th, after more than a year of relative isolation, an aspiring singer named Lily Davies entered a recording studio in Toronto for her first post-pandemic writing session with strangers. The 20-year-old had scribbled a slew of lyrics earlier that day after a boozy brunch; …
Read More »How Millennials Became Cheugy
Millennials have it rough. We’re underemployed. We’re overworked. We constantly have to live with the specter of betrayal from our generational heroes: JK Rowling’s conversion to TERFdom, for instance, or the realization that Barack Obama was not nearly as cool as we thought. We can’t replicate Jules’s eye makeup from …
Read More »Want a TikTok Hit? Have $30,000?
Early in 2019, a manager for an aspiring rapper named Flo Milli tracked down the TikTok user @nicemichael and offered him $200 to bring more attention to a dance for “Beef Flomix.” The resulting video clip amassed more than 100,000 likes, helping jumpstart “Beef Flomix;” after the song became popular …
Read More »Songs Are Becoming Hits on TikTok Before They're Even Released
Earlier this year, the internet-famous dancer Toosie received a message from the biggest star on the planet. “Drake hit me up and was like, ‘Yo, I need your help,’” Toosie told Rolling Stone. The rapper sent over a verse and a hook to a song that didn’t yet have a …
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