On TikTok, any action, any aesthetic, any type of content, no matter how niche, can become a trend.
![ted cruz daughters minecraft ted cruz daughters minecraft](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ff/9c/06/ff9c069d0ef8abc6c41103d1b9d336a7.jpg)
Suddenly Luke’s For Your page became nothing but various videos of people accidentally running into Segel, as if it was its own video challenge. I’ve been really curious about these localized trending content storms ever since my podcast co-host Luke noticed a weird thing where TikTok users kept sharing videos of people accidentally running into the actor Jason Segel. And, of course, all of this continues to make the content heavily promoted inside of TikTok. Then, as the content has spread outside of TikTok and on to Twitter, it has ballooned out into an entire discourse cycle, as users debate whether it’s sexist to think that sorority rush content is weird. This first wave, based on a cursory glance, seems to have been mainly from people ridiculing these videos. Then, because, as I said, TikTok is an iterative content machine, there was a second wave of people on TikTok dueting and commenting on bizarre sorority videos. TikTok in 2021 is a bit like Facebook in 2013, where a lot of users seem to be using it fairly earnestly still. First, students uncynically began sharing their content. All of this seems to have led to a localized viral content storm which is now hovering over the various sorority houses of the state of Alabama.īut TikTok isn’t a static social network, so the sorority rush content is happening in weird waves. Now, however, in parts of the country with fairly lax COVID protocols (like Alabama), TikTok is lighting up with college students share videos about heading back to school. Last fall, TikTok would have most likely been the theater through which the rest of the country watched Gen Z go off to college, but because of the pandemic, that didn’t really happen. The impromptu TikTok meet-up-turned-riot that was Adrian’s Kickback is a great example of how this plays out both online and off, as content influences irl behavior which creates more content, ad infinitum. Over the course of the pandemic, TikTok has become the dominant app for documenting real life for young Americans.
![ted cruz daughters minecraft ted cruz daughters minecraft](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9b/46/5e/9b465e66d24633e2d1382ece6b20ac71.jpg)
Every single meme and trend that has ever existed on the internet has been uploaded onto TikTok at this point. Because of that, the platform’s users have burned through the entire history of internet content in the span of like three years. It wants you to remix the content inside the app. But its algorithm seems to be different than Facebook’s or YouTube’s. TikTok is, now, the most important social network in America. And, every time one of these platforms succeeds in capturing that audience, we typically end up with a new blast of viral sorority content.
![ted cruz daughters minecraft ted cruz daughters minecraft](https://i.etsystatic.com/11579451/r/il/0a619b/1868271544/il_fullxfull.1868271544_oc96.jpg)
The MTV-ification of YouTube over the last five years is a great example of this. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram (obvz), Vine, Snapchat and now TikTok, have all had phases where they’ve used the social power of young women and girls to make their website part of American pop culture. Įvery single social network has, at one point, become the home of the “basic white girl”. Although, interestingly, if you currently google “viral white woman” the results are all “Karen” stories. Whether it’s through endless thinkpieces analyzing and scrutinizing young women’s interests and trends - the constant pop anthropology of millennial and Gen Z women - or, on the flip side, through the ubiquitous gendered harassment and abuse from male-dominated internet communities, college-aged women essentially are viral content. Social media, as a whole, is deeply obsessed with young women, particularly white American women. I wanted to try and sketch out a theory as to why.
![ted cruz daughters minecraft ted cruz daughters minecraft](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6a/7a/de/6a7ade2d4ee33836be51d6f8b8d1d2bf.jpg)
And it seems like this year, more than any year previously, sorority rush content has become super sticky inside of TikTok’s recommendation engine. I’ve seen multiple reports that everyone’s TikTok For You pages are filling up with Alabama sorority rush content.