[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

Elon Musk once suffered a mental breakdown amid growing concerns that his reputation was becoming tarnished while running Twitter, writer Ben Mezrich claims.

“He got to a point where he locked himself in his office, was so upset that the Twitter employees were considering calling in a wellness check by the San Francisco police because they thought he was going to self-harm,” the “Breaking Twitter” author alleged on CNBC Tuesday.

“I think he truly cares about his reputation.”

Mezrich, 54, claimed Musk, 52, is a much different person than who he was prior to purchasing the impactful social media platform in 2022.

“Twitter broke Elon Musk,” the nonfiction writer said. “Not only did he destroy this sort of global town hall, but he destroyed himself in the process.”

The sole function of Omegle, created in 2009, was to match users at random for one-on-one video chats. “The internet is full of cool people,” the site’s tagline claimed. “Omegle lets you meet them.” Who exactly you’d meet, however, was a gamble, as users did not have to provide a username or profile picture. You didn’t even need to make an account before you came face-to-face with anyone else, of any age, who also happened to be online at the time, in any part of the world.

The anonymity was alluring to us. Sometimes, we would add “tags” to filter the people we matched with by interest: One Direction, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande. According to court documents, sexual predators used the site to encourage children to perform sex acts, to show them pornography, or to lure them into real-life meetings, Mother Jones reported last year. One lawsuit against Omegle declared the “most regular and popular use” of the site was “live sexual activity, such as online masturbation”.

“Who’s your fave member of 1D?” I remember asking a black screen in an Omegle chat. “Take your top off,” the screen replied.

Last week, 14 years after its launch, Omegle announced it was shutting down for good. The news comes after the company was sued by a woman accusing the site of randomly pairing her with a predator. The $22m lawsuit alleged that when she was 11, she encountered a man on Omegle who coerced her through grooming into three years of “sexual servitude”. She is not alone: the site has been mentioned in at least 50 cases against predators in recent years, according to the BBC. (The woman and Omegle settled in early November.)

The news of Omegle’s closure is prompting some people in my generation to, perhaps for the first time, grapple with who and what they encountered on the site as kids.

For about five minutes a few months ago, people seemed to genuinely believe that our culture was entering the age of “deinfluencing.” “Step aside, influencers,” wrote CNN. “A new breed of ‘deinfluencers’ has arrived, and they’re saying that materialism and overpriced trends are no longer in style.” The idea of the “deinfluencer” was that instead of encouraging you to buy stuff, the influencer would encourage you to ... not buy stuff.

At first, many videos tagged “deinfluencing” were genuine appeals to push back against influencer culture; people talked about how overspending and viral haul videos were part of an unsustainable and unethical system of capitalism that moved at the speed of TikTok trends, often including mea culpas about how their own videos had contributed to that system. It was pretty interesting, honestly, to hear people whose livelihoods depend on selling other people’s products reflect publicly on what their job has meant for the mental health, spending habits, and ethics of both themselves and their viewers.

What started as a rare glimpse into what professional salespeople truly feel and believe, however, immediately became a rather ingenious sales pitch once the hashtag caught on: Instead of influencing people to buy stuff, influencers who tagged their posts “deinfluencing” were simply posting negative reviews of products they didn’t think were worth the money, and — more often than not — telling you what to buy instead (one was captioned “showing you products that can potentially help with overconsumerism!”)

Did anyone really think a TikTok trend was the beginning of the end of capitalism? Probably not. In the months since “deinfluencing” faded from the discourse, TikTok has made consumption on its platform even more inescapable with the launch of TikTok Shop, a feature allowing viewers to buy a product shown in a video without leaving the app. TikTok Shop videos — recognizable by the orange shopping cart tag next to the description — are everywhere, and they are leaving people’s TikTok feeds “in shambles.” TikTok has always been full of product-hawking, much of it rather sneaky: You might be watching a video of someone doing their makeup and they happen to name the brand of mascara they’re wearing, or a lifestyle influencer is showing her newly renovated living room and suddenly all the commenters demand to know where she bought her lamp. (If she says no, that’s gatekeeping! Even the very language of the platform encourages consumption!) The app was already full of cheap, unethically made goods from sites like Temu or AliExpress, but TikTok Shop has made it even easier for people to buy them and much more lucrative to sell them.

Still, stories about how “influencing is over” have proliferated ever since influencers have existed. It happened when the FTC sent warning letters to influencers saying that they needed to include advertising disclosures on all of their sponsored posts, and the mainstream media predicted this would torch their ability to come off as relatable and authentic (the effect was the opposite). It happened when influencers were called out for promoting disastrous music festivals, it happened when Instagram added the option to hide “like” counts on photos, and it happened when the pandemic forced everyone inside.

Yet so far, nothing has come even remotely close to slowing the influencer economy. By all metrics, the industry is growing: The number of content creators is expected to grow at a 10 percent to 20 percent compound rate during the next five years, according to Goldman Sachs. The market is on track to rise from $16.4 billion in 2022 to $21 billion in 2023, and advertisers are spending less in traditional media and more on influencers because young consumers tend to trust influencers over brands and social media over national news outlets. The definition of “influencing” has continually expanded, not contracted; what started as the province of consumer categories like fashion, beauty, travel, food, and fitness now includes political activism, literature, music, art, corporate life, dating, and mental health. If it exists, there are influencers for it.

Prederick wrote:

Elon continues his devolution.

I mean, he's already RT'd and endorsed white nationalist viewpoints, so this isn't THAT much of a shock.

And yet it's Tik Tok that's getting dragged for anti-Semites reading the Bin Laden letter to America.

Prederick wrote:

Rat Boy wrote:

Prederick wrote:

Elon continues his devolution.

I mean, he's already RT'd and endorsed white nationalist viewpoints, so this isn't THAT much of a shock.

And yet it's Tik Tok that's getting dragged for anti-Semites reading the Bin Laden letter to America.

/does 30 seconds of research

We're like two months away from contradicting Dril, aren't we?

@jbouie.bsky.social wrote:

you don’t have to hand it to a mass murdering billionaire theocrat whose post-hoc justification for mass murder is 2/3rds insane theocratic beliefs and psychotic antisemitism & 1/3rd the kind of surface level critique of US foreign policy you’d find in a half decent brief from a high school debater

TikTok deleted most of the content related to Bin Laden and his “Letter To America,” making any kind of digital forensics difficult. But according to most news articles I’ve seen and a couple X users that downloaded her videos, the influencer Lynette Adkins is as close as we’ll get to a patient zero here. That said, there has been a lot of Bin Laden interest — and revisionism — on TikTok for the last month. It’s an extremely global app and a large chunk of its most-active users were born after 9/11. So I don’t think it’s that surprising. As we all discovered in 2016, a whole bunch of young millennials spent their early 20s talking about Hitler on Reddit.

Adkins’ video and TikTok account are down, but one of the videos she made about the letter is here. And at least one of Adkins’ videos had a couple million views. She’s a lifestyle influencer and, based on just the titles of her YouTube videos, it seems like she’s in the midst of the infamous “Isolate Yourself With An Impulse Move To LA And Then Mentally Unravel” content pivot. I wish her the best.

Per Know Your Meme, from there the letter was shared by TikTok users like @cannablissful, another lifestyle influencer that focuses on mental health and, as her username implies, weed. Her video is down now, as well, but when I screenshot it yesterday, it had around two million views. And I wouldn’t even say it was pro-Bin Laden. Though, it wasn’t, you know, anti-Bin Laden either. Another user that was absolutely definitely sharing the letter as being good, however, was @fairykingb, who makes videos with a leftist bent about health and wellness sorta-kinda. And his video, as of yesterday, before it was pulled down, had around 500,000 views.

The point is that the initial wave of interest around the letter, as far as I can tell, was happening among lifestyle and wellness influencers — and not particularly popular ones. Even after a wave of news stories about her, Adkins still has less than 40,000 followers on Instagram. While @cannablissful has around 11,000 followers and @fairykingb has 6,000.

Getting a sense of how big this conversation was is hard, though, because TikTok is being incredibly aggressive about deleting any content it thinks may be about the letter, including news outlets covering it. But yesterday, I pulled up the TikTok domain and the search term “letter to America” on Google and I set a custom date range of 11/1/2023-11/15/2023 and took a spin through about 30 pages of results. It’s by no means a complete picture of what was happening on the app before the crackdown, but Google had cached some of the deleted videos and it painted a picture that was in line with what I had seen screenshot elsewhere.

The accounts sharing the letter were small and the videos they were making were not getting a lot of activity compared to the rest of TikTok. I’d also estimate about 25% were bots or outraged duets, TikTok’s equivalent of a quote tweet. Similarly, here are a few screenshots of some of the videos. The view counts aren’t shown, but the most-shared one has around 3,000 shares.

My friend Luke Bailey suggested comparing Bin Laden’s popularity to something else going viral this week, like Travis Kelce. And, well, as of the night of November 14th, according to worldwide Google Trends, one Bin Laden was worth about 11% of one Travis Kelce in the attention economy. And, only looking at USA Google Trends, Bin Laden was even less popular, amounting to around 7% of a Travis Kelce. There was some slight growth in searches for “Letter to America” as of the night of November 14th, but still, it was much less popular than Travis Kelce.

According to The Washington Post, there were around 275 TikTok videos using the #lettertoamerica hashtag, which was viewed about two million times. Based on what I saw on Google, the hashtag actually accounted for a pretty small minority of videos — most of the big videos were doing a “iykyk” sort of subtweet about it. But it’s still a useful benchmark. For context, the most popular hashtag on TikTok over the last seven days was #tiktokshopblackfriday, which has 380 million combined views.

Which brings us to the question of what a “view” actually means on TikTok. And getting a handle on that will be important for where this story goes next. “It's extremely bizarre to see reporters claiming that dozens of videos and millions of views on TikTok constitutes a trend,” Slate’s Scott Nover wrote. “Just demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale and reach of TikTok — let alone the internet.”

So, right now, the popular wisdom is that TikTok counts a single second as a single view. That said, a developer I work with named Morry Kolman has done some tests on this and it may be even less than a second. A view is very possibly just every unique open or autoplay of a video. Meanwhile, a view on YouTube is around 30 seconds and a view on Facebook is around three seconds. So if we were to take one of the most viral videos about Bin Laden’s letter, which had around two million views, and applied Facebook’s view metric, it would have around 660,000 views. And if it was a YouTube video, it would have around 65,000. Now, let’s ask ourselves. Would you, in 2023, give a sh*t if someone was saying something unhinged and offensive in a YouTube video with 65,000 views? If so, good news, I can send you millions of videos that match that exact description! Just go search “The Marvels” and have a blast.

This inability to understand the scale of TikTok is, almost certainly, why, on November 15th, sh*t hit the fan. According to 404 Media, Guardian editors woke up, saw that their archive of Bin Laden’s letter was getting traffic from “social media,” and decided to delete it. A Guardian spokesperson said, “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared today on social media without its original context.”

This clearly had a Streisand effect on the letter and you can see that in the Google Trends data. Throughout the day, interest on Google grew as users discovered the letter had been taken down. But what really lit up the internet landed the evening of November 15th and, as is almost always the case with TikTok virality, wasn’t a TikTok video at all. Just someone with a blue checkmark tweeting about it.

Huff Post contributor Yashar Ali posted a five-minute supercut on X that he appears to have made himself of TikTok users talking about Bin Laden’s letter. Adkins and @fairykingb are two of the users included in it. “Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous ‘Letter to America,’ in which he explained why he attacked the United States,” Ali wrote.

I spent all day yesterday looking for the “thousands” of videos. Of course, TikTok was already in the process of scrubbing them, but according to screenshots and cached Google data, I’m comfortable saying there were likely around 300-500 unique videos about the letter and, once again, around 25% of what I personally saw were bots or automated accounts or duets. And the largest comment section I’ve seen underneath one of these videos had around 5,000 comments. Now, let’s do this again. Would you, in 2023, give a sh*t if there were around 5,000 people being offensive on the internet? Well, if you would, I, once again, have some good news for you. Type “X.com” into your URL bar and make sure to follow the site’s CEO, he has a lot of interesting ideas about race and gender.

What is clear to me is that Ali’s video is the most viral piece of content about this whole controversy. And it’s also, as far as I can see, the biggest driver of attention about the letter. This is something The Washington Post and TikTok’s policy team have both corroborated. TikTok released a pretty strongly-worded statement about this, writing, “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.” And in another statement from a TikTok spokesperson they were even more explicit, writing that the #lettertoamerica hashtag jumped from around two million to 13 million views after Ali’s supercut was posted on X.

Also, just to really hammer this home, I was contacted by a moderator for TikTok last night who requested they remain anonymous. They work for ByteDance’s English-language market in Europe. They told me two things: One, in the five days before Ali’s video, they hadn’t seen anything come through about Bin Laden. And, two, accounts with over 11,000 followers are flagged with a “high influence” note internally and watched more closely. Which may explain why TikTok wasn’t noticing this right away — because it was mainly being shared by randos.

After Ali blew it up, journalists pounced. As The Atlantic Council’s Emerson T. Brooking put it, the “trend” became real and, worse for the rest of us, became a “D.C. story.” TikTok is a political lightning rod and this story was perfect for Democrats who want to explain away the very real generational divide happening on the left around support for Israel. And it’s also perfect for Republicans who are frightened that TikTok’s algorithm can turn red-blooded American men into Xi Jinping-worshipping catboys, or whatever.

And so the story has morphed from what should have been a weird curiosity — and perhaps even a moment to reflect on America’s post-9/11 legacy — into a full-blown national scandal with dumb-dumb headlines getting written about it, like CNN’s “Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden”. I mean, I haven’t even had time in this piece to point out that a lot of the people I saw sharing the letter were millennials! But, yeah, teens f*cking love Bin Laden. They’re saying 9/11 just hits different now no cap fr. Gen Z wants Baby Gronk to lead Al-Qaeda in a victorious jihad against the western imperialist hegemony gyatt!!

All of this insanity is also obscuring some very important questions about why the letter was being shared in the first place. For instance, was this an op of some kind? Why are so many of the videos in the supercut almost word-for-word identical? My hunch is it probably wasn’t and that this is actually just an example of how loosy-goosy TikTok’s wellness community is, but it’s worth asking.

And, really, this is yet another example of how everything we see about TikTok is just being filtered through a media and political apparatus that doesn’t know how it works and has no issue cherry-picking random nonsense out of the app to fit whatever agenda they subscribe to. As New York Mag’s John Herrman wrote, “[The Bin Laden letter] became popular much in the way that posts from accounts like @LibsofTikTok do, by giving users license, via a video ripped from elsewhere, to drop their inhibitions and rage out a little bit.” Which is the real takeaway here.

Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week. We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does. And what’s worse here is that there are very real issues with how TikTok works. It is a major source of misinfo and disinfo. It still has a terrible bullying problem. And, ironically enough, it’s also one of the most oppressively censorious social platforms that has ever existed. To the point users had to create a puritanical version of leet speak to communicate on it. But we can’t even begin to address those issues unless we start to look clear-eyed at what is actually happening on the app. And it is most certainly not the digital hub of a large-scale Gen Z Bin Laden fandom. Be f*cking serious.

The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like a clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.

Anyways, your regularly scheduled garbage will be back next week. If you want to check out what’s behind the paywall, hit the green button below. Have a good weekend, everyone! Maybe stay off TikTok for a little bit.