ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, predates its name and iterations on the Internet. The term describes a tingling sensation one feels on their scalp and down their spine, similar to mild paresthesia. Over the last decade, a community surrounding videos devoted to the phenomenon has cropped up on YouTube, with top ASMR creators boasting millions of subscribers. One of the longstanding misconceptions about ASMR, and its thriving community of creators on YouTube, is that it is somehow fundamentally sexual. This could not be further from the truth. After researching ASMR on YouTube for years and publishing research on the community, I have found that while sexual ASMR does exist, not all ASMR is sexual. Furthermore, most ASMRtists only hope to provide relaxation and anxiety, and insomnia relief to viewers. ASMR is induced in an individual by “triggers,” or sounds and visuals that spur on the phenomenon

But as Lily Whispers ASMR’s video discussed, just because creators do not view their videos as sexual does not mean audience members don’t. Lily discussed how when she first started her channel, she would get “really specific requests…if someone is like can you wear red, and whisper about your day, and do something with your eyes, and they get really specific…it’s a fetish. I’m sorry, but it is. There was another that asked me to make a video pretending they were a little person.” While Lily was quick to assure viewers she wasn’t kink-shaming, she pointed out she was drawing attention to two things: One, there was a time, place, and site for sexual video requests, and YouTube wasn’t necessarily it. Two, by cloaking their requests in the guise of ASMR relaxation, these requesters were sneakily forcing these creators into satisfying them sexually.

In the age of content creation on sites like YouTube and TikTok, creators must constantly walk a fine line between listening to and honoring viewer requests, and doing what works for them. The modern Internet has been described as an “attention economy,” in which the supply of available content massively outnumbers the demand. It is physically impossible for one to consume every bit of content out there, or even all the content within their own interests. ASMR, and its YouTube creators, are no exception. I’ve written extensively on the relationships between ASMR creators and viewers, and I discuss how this relationship is multifaceted. For ASMR creators to be successful, they must listen to and honor (some) viewer requests when they are able to. For viewers who are loyal fans, they strive to do whatever they can to help their favorite creator’s career. As I’ve found, sometimes these requests do get hyper-specific, such as individuals requesting certain letter sounds to be pronounced in certain ways.

This multifaceted relationship, combined with the unique nature of ASMR triggers and numerous possibilities for video types, means that ASMRtists face a volatile and potentially dangerous terrain. As Lily Whispers ASMR points out, the road to cloaked, insidious fetishes and arousal here is a short one. While some ASMRtists do have Patreon and OnlyFans accounts that are purposefully for more adult content, the bulk of ASMR on YouTube is not meant for that. In her video, she went on to detail more instances of this, where “sock puppet” commenters (online accounts used for the purposes of deception) were copying and pasting the same, supposedly urgent request onto numerous creators videos, and then asking them to mail them the props they used. Lily even recounted a more unsettling story, in which a young girl under ten was making ASMR videos, and commenters were requesting her to make videos putting on lotion or making kissing sounds by the microphone (children doing ASMR remains one of the most controversial subjects in the ASMR community).

Lily’s video draws attention to the complex and unsettling ways requests to not just ASMRtists, but all YouTube creators can become sexual harassment or abuse. Creators may want to adhere to audience requests to build their channels and fan bases, but doing so also poses a risk. As Lily mentions in her video, “just because something seems innocent to us doesn’t mean that it is to the person who put in the request.”

In a brief follow-up video, Lily talked about how she had created a private Discord server just for ASMRtists, so they could share creepy screenshots and requests. In doing so, creators would form a network to weed out and avoid any forced fetishization in the future — something that has also been referred to as fetish mining. While a good step in protecting themselves, the move should not have been necessary. This is another instance in which YouTube has failed to protect those who have helped make them one of the wealthiest and powerful social media platforms on the planet. While Lily talks about how these comments wind up in the creators held for review or spam folders, this is not always the case. Furthermore, by allowing users to create multiple accounts or “sock puppets,” the site allows such harm to continue.

To be clear — the problem is not with ASMR, ASMRtists or YouTube creators, but with bad actors and platforms that fail to protect their creators. ASMRtists are certainly by no means the only creators to face this type of sexual harassment. The harassment, sexual or not, that creators face may not be as explicit as slurs or threats, but the manipulation of creator, attention, and platform dynamics for one’s own insidious ends.

Over the last decade, the monetization of digital content creation has made these teenagers’ aspirations possible (though, harshly, not probable). Alongside the creator economy, a financial system emerged, first in the form of external sites like PayPal, Vimeo, and most notably for creators, Patreon, but also from platforms themselves. As creators began to profit off of their digital content through third-party sites, the platforms that host the content jumped into the mix with things like the YouTube Partner Program, TikTok’s Creator Fund, and Twitch Partners. These external sites, monetization funds, and advertising revenue plans fund certain creators in varying ways, proving that influencer marketing is not the only way of making money on social media.

However, as someone who has studied Internet video cultures, creators, viewers, and their labor for the better part of the last decade, I take great issue with terms like “patronage” and “Creator Renaissance” to describe this moment. First, patronage is much too narrow of a term to describe the way money exchanges (virtual) hands in the creator economy, nor does it account for the mitigating or aggravating actions of platforms hosting the content. This is what leads me to take umbrage with the term “Creator Renaissance” — such a phrase assumes all creators are treated equally, which is a stark farce.

Many describe fan and viewer interactions with their favorite creators as patronage. This idea suggests that fans and viewers pay their favorite creators in exchange for content, which harkens back to the idea of patronage in the art world. Rich, wealthy benefactors would subsidize creators for their work, but in doing so, the patron exercised immense creative control over the content. This historical attribute is often overlooked in using the term “patron” to describe the creator/viewer relationship. As I argue in my research on ASMR creators and viewers, while patronage is still possible in the creator economy, we are now in a moment the blurs classic patronage with something Art Sociologist Janet Wolff describes as the “dealer-critic system.” The dealer-critic system was a byproduct of history’s artistic Renaissance, in which artists now didn’t just have to respond to the demands of a patron, but the institutions that arose in modernity to mitigate art — such as dealers and critics. Art dealers brokered sales, critics wrote about pieces in newfangled newspapers.

I’ve argued that in general, the creator economy landscape is a hybrid patronage/dealer-critic system. Individuals may still request specific types of content, either in video comments or in more formalized manners like on Patreon, but in this case, the hosting platform itself acts as the dealer-critic. Through community standards guidelines, content moderation, platform dynamics, and in choosing what types of content is allowed on the site and what types can even be monetized, social media platforms exercise a fair degree of control and influence over the possibilities for income for creators.

To be sure, direct patronage in the creator economy still exists. Individuals can support their favorite creators through varying tiered memberships on Patreon, and in exchange, they may get individually tailored content. It is also worth remembering, however, the Patreon also is a dealer-critic. It can choose what funds to allow or disallow, and despite touting itself as a way for creators to earn money for their craft, creators still struggle to pay their rent as Patreon was recently valued at $4 billion.

Second, the term Creator Renaissance implies that this moment is jovial, fair, and equal for all creators. This is simply not true. This is a Creator Renaissance for some creators. As I argue in my research, rising tides in the creator economy do not lift all boats. This is most of because of one, platforms not understanding the types of content being shared on their sites, or two, the fact much of the creator economy has actually replicated the Legacy Media hierarchies and inequalities they claim to leave behind. Let me unpack these.

As I found in my research on ASMR creators and viewers, as well as pet influencers (aspiring and professional), platforms often do not understand the content that is being shared. This means the content may be unfairly demonetized, or denied profits and funds from the platform. This was particularly common in the ASMR community, as YouTube often demonetized ASMR content for being “sexual” (while sexual ASMR exists, there is nothing fundamentally or inherently sexual about ASMR). For a brief time in 2018, even third-party monetization sites like PayPal denied the transfer of funds for anything pertaining to ASMR, citing similar reasons.

The current creator economy also replicates traditional Legacy Media hierarchies and inequalities more often than it rebukes them. What I mean by this is that there is often a belief that social media and digital content creation are inherently more democratic than their legacy predecessors of film, broadcast news, and television. While technically, anyone can access a potential platform in the creator economy, access does not equal attention or guarantee an equal playing field.

Creators in this economy often fall into the very trappings of Legacy Media — gatekeeping, a hierarchical structure in which certain creators are valued more than others, and identity inequalities. Gatekeeping and hierarchical structure often go hand-in-hand. When creators position themselves as an authority on a subject or the creator economy in general, they relegate others to lower positions than them.

Perhaps more insidious is the way the Creator Economy is racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, and disability-phobic. This has become particularly apparent on TikTok, as the platform faces constant criticism for censoring certain bodies. Plus-size women, trans creators, and creators with disabilities have long documented how TikTok removes their content or bans their accounts when nothing seemingly violated their terms of service — except for TikTok doesn’t want to promote these types of people and their bodies. TikTok has also faced backlash for who it does promote, and this bleeds over into Legacy Media institutions as well. Jimmy Fallon recently faced criticism for inviting TikTok star Addison Rae onto his show to perform popular TikTok dances. Rae, a young, cisgender white woman, performed dances that had actually been created by majority Black dancers Mya Nicole Johnson, Chris Cotter, Dorien Scott, Fur-Quan Powell, Camyra Franklin, Adam Snyder, Nate Nale, Greg Dahl, and Keara Wilson. Instead of choosing to showcase the actual creators, Fallon (and even TikTok) promoted the white woman who took the others’ content.

The problem of “patronage” and “Creator Renaissance” go hand-in-hand: Both ignore the role platforms play in mediating content, as well as how this seeps into traditional Legacy Media, like Fallon’s show. This is far from a utopian moment for content creators. This is not an inherently equalizing moment. This is a moment that involves tough conversations for creators, viewers, platforms, and third-party payment sites like Patreon, as most users struggle to make ends meet on platforms that are worth billions of dollars. Content creators are just that — they create content, and not just for their fans, but for the platforms that make billions off of them. We also tend to historically romanticize the Renaissance, while ignoring its horrific inequalities and overlooking the problems it ushered in for us today. We don’t need a Renaissance in the creator economy — for creators to actually make fair livings, they may need a revolt.

“Perhaps that does explain the dressing choice: Many of us have been hiding inside for so long, feeling scared and powerless, that there’s something liberating about taking clothes off. Though the answer may also be simply that we’ve forgotten how to dress for public-ish injections. Or the need to do something to get attention in an age of social media chaos. If everyone’s taking selfies, how do you signal that your selfie is an important selfie?”

Vaccine selfies do exist on the historical trajectory of publicly documenting vaccinations that Friedman lays out, but it overlooks one major historical, technological shift — social media and the rise of the front-facing camera. Friedman acknowledges these developments: “First, social media really took off (it’s hard to remember, but the iPhone was introduced in 2007, which was the same year Facebook and Twitter went global. Instagram didn’t appear until 2010). But Friedman glosses over them after that, and even examining vaccination selfies from a public health standpoint can’t do the phenomenon justice. We must also consider image-sharing practices specifically from a social media perspective.

In only speaking to public health researchers, a computer science researcher, and an engineering professor, Friedman overlooks an entire body of researchers — media and communication researchers, and even more specifically, Internet and selfie researchers. In doing so, her article falls into a trap that is routinely debunked by all the aforementioned scholars: Technological determinism, or the idea that technology is responsible for all social and cultural movements. Technological determinism cannot explain vaccine selfies, nor can it explain why Elvis, Barack Obama, and Gerald Ford getting their vaccines in public may have the implications that they did. Yes, from a public health standpoint, seeing notable figures get a vaccine may increase someone else’s likelihood of getting one, but it doesn’t explain why average, everyday people — not designer Marc Jacobs or Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis — take a vaccine selfie and post it online.

I’ve spent the last decade researching selfies and how and why people take and share them. As we entered the 2010s, selfies were routinely decried as harbingers of an increasingly narcissistic culture, and while this sentiment does sometimes remain, selfies have become such a common occurrence in the social media landscape that many don’t think twice before taking, sharing, or looking at one.

My research has refuted claims of selfies as narcissistic, instead proposing that selfies are a way of documenting oneself to stand out, aligning with larger bodies of research onto digital celebrity and influencers. Additionally, I have discussed in The Journal of Popular Culture how selfies are a way to control’s one’s image-narrative, particularly for marginalized groups. In a media landscape rife with stereotypes and inaccurate representations, selfies allow one to take, share, and control their own image and “talk back” to these inaccurate narratives. My doctoral dissertation at the University of Georgia also examined divorce selfies, and how in taking and sharing them, individuals change the narrative around something that has been so stigmatized for so long.

Vaccine selfies are all about changing the narrative.

In the last year, if you’ve been following social distancing protocols and lockdown restrictions, what cool, exciting, fun things were there to document? There were no trips. There were no boozy brunches. The format of taking a selfie with a friend was quite literally a violation of social distancing if that person wasn’t in your quarantine bubble — squeezing together to fit in your camera’s frame is way less than six feet apart. We could only take so many selfies with our pets, plants, and sourdough bread starters. In the COVID-19, era we were all subject to a life event we didn’t have control over. On a large scale, none of us were really in control of our narratives. Vaccines are the end of this.

By taking vaccine selfies, individuals one, finally have a noteworthy event to document, some for the first time in fourteen months. Two, we are taking back our lives and our COVID-19 narratives by showing that yes, finally, there is an end in sight. In this sense, Friedman is right. There is something liberating about the vaccine and the selfies we take of them, but not just because we want to take our clothes off (Added tip: Vaccine selfies are better than posting a picture of your vaccination card since crawlers will scan these images online and steal your personal information).

Dutch Internet researcher Jose van Dijck has long documented how photography, cameras, and selfies changed social media practice, and one quote from 2008 changed my academic career forever: Photography in the digital and early social media age had undergone a shift, and it now privileged “live communication instead of storing pictures of life.” By this, van Dijck meant we were no longer taking photographs solely to look back on one day in albums or in frames. We still did this, sure, but there was a new primary motivation for digital photo sharing when shared to a social media site: To document and communicate what we were doing in the present moment. This cultural shift was not due solely to digital cameras, front-facing phone cameras, or social media platforms, but those combined with a social imperative to connect and document our lives in ways that were true to us.

Vaccine selfies document a marked shift in an era where we didn’t have a lot of say over our circumstances. By choosing to get vaccinated, we are reclaiming our narratives and actively communicating to the world what we wanted for over a year: “I’m finally safe. It’s actually going to be over soon.”

On Thursday, the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify on their platforms’ roles in the 1/6/21 Capitol insurrection. The entire hearing was a comedy of errors, and it was all too predictable. The entire hearing was a farce, and it played out exactly the same as every other time Big Tech CEOs have shown up on The Hill. The thing was, the CEOs were prepared. We knew they’d dodge questions and eschew responsibility for the most dangerous parts of their platforms and business models. Congress, however, seems to have learned nothing from their previous encounters with Big Tech, and even worse, they seem to not care to learn.

This is not the first time the U.S. Congress has let their social media and tech ignorance fly in the face of these men. In 2018, when Mark Zuckerberg was called before the Senate in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, politicians of both parties stepped in it. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) famously asked, “how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” With a rare show of emotion, Zuck responded, “Senator, we run ads.” But Senator Hatch was not alone. Senator Marcia Cantwell (D-WA), tried to coin a nickname for Peter Thiel’s Palantir, referring to it as “Stanford Analytica,” which often stumped Zuck. In July of 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, this time with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were back in front of the House Judiciary Committee for an anti-trust hearing, politicians fumbled over their own agendas and focused very little on any matters actually pertaining to anti-trust legislation.

Thursday’s hearing was no exception. The opening statements demonstrated that the committee was grossly ill-prepared for the matter at hand. You would have hardly known the hearing was pithily called “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.” While there were mentions of QAnon conspiracies and COVID mis-and-disinformation, most congressmen and women chose to pontificate on bias, the dangers of social media for children and teenagers, and the CEO’s personal opinions. “Do you think COVID vaccines work?” one democratic congressman asked. Why they were wasting time with personal opinions was never established. The fact the hearing’s title couldn’t even distinguish between misinformation and disinformation is unsettling. Misinformation refers to false rumors, insults, and pranks, whereas disinformation refers to deliberatively deceptive information, such as malicious hoaxes and propaganda. Both spread rapidly on social media. The committee was even unable to catch Zuckerberg in a lie, in which he claimed misinformation was not allowed in advertisements on their site.

It would be easy to fall into ageist accusations here. Most of Facebook’s users are younger than most of America’s senators. Yet, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that even the older senators post almost as much, if not more, than their younger counterparts. The truth, then, is much more damning: Many American politicians simply don’t care to learn.

The hearing felt like every congressman and woman had prepared by watching the overly simplistic documentary that was all the rage last fall, The Social Dilemma. Any Internet scholar will eschew this documentary for three main reasons: one, it plays up dystopian narratives about social media; two, zooms in on algorithms and platform design as the sole cause for social media’s problems (it’s much more complicated than that); and three, depends on dated tropes about social media addiction and mental harm, particularly for children.

If you watched Thursday’s hearing, all of the congressional questions seemed to be ripped straight from The Social Dilemma. The takes were overly simplistic and frankly, embarrassing, given the number of experts and public scholars there are doing research in these areas. While the excellent work of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Donovan was cited at times by a few committee members, it was clear that most of Congress hadn’t done their homework. And while these hearings are always more about grandstanding than actual conversations, it was apparent that even the representatives’ bombastic speeches and questions weren’t based in any form of reality about how social media actually work.

Part of this problem was because of the narratives and ideologies represented. These politicians have an overly simplistic understanding of how social media work because they have an overly simplistic understanding of how media work. Their questions grant social media platforms immense power, and while social media platforms have power, they are not all-powerful. In phrasing their questions this way, representatives erase the agency of all platform users. Social media cannot make anyone do anything. For once, I agreed with something Mark Zuckerberg said when he said the problem wasn’t one platform but the entire media ecosystem — he’s right. Social media platforms are terrains for action, interaction, and communication. As I’ve written elsewhere, platforms like to be hands-off in moderating these terrains (or, “publics”). That’s not a good thing. Social media platforms’ hands-off approach, combined with politicians’ ignorance of the nuances of how media function with individuals and audiences, means we are going to keep running in circles on Big Tech regulation until those with the power to make decisions bother to educate themselves.

Any politician has a standing invitation to join my Social Media & Society class that I teach at the University of Alabama any time they want.

Politicians of both parties both agree on something for once — something needs to be done about Big Tech. The issue is, however, is that they view the problems Big Tech puts forth as fundamentally different. My rather simplistic summary is like so: Conservatives view social media as massively overreaching, harming children, and propagating anti-conservative bias with free speech violations. Liberals remain largely concerned with hate speech and similarly harmful practices, and they are also staunchly against existing self-regulation. If Congress can’t even agree on what should be done, these hearings will continue to just be political theater while the problems of misinformation, disinformation, and extremism continue to spread. As media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has famously argued for over a decade, “the problem with Facebook is Facebook.” Politicians can’t even zoom out from the minutae to see this.

In an op-ed yesterday, in Slate, Jonathan L. Fischer proposed these hearings could improve if the CEOs were allowed to grill each other. While quite a suggestion, such a proposition sounds like it belongs straight in an Aaron Sorkin show. Argumentative competition for the stake of dramatics that will ultimately change hearts and minds? Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write it any better himself. The problem is, that’s not reality, and politicians already have a showboating and theatrics problem at these hearings. We shouldn’t encourage the CEOs to have the same.

One congressman told the CEOs that he had polled his constituents, and no one trusted these companies to do the right thing. That may be true. But if Congress doesn’t get their act together, and we continue to have more showboating and embarrassment, Big Tech will run unchecked, while politicians continue to spin endlessly.

Netflix’s The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and FX and Hulu’s Framing Britney Spears focus on the complicated personal issues and tragic circumstances of two very different women, but they both have one thing in common — how Internet sleuths latch onto the stories, dissect every publicly available piece of information, and even, at times, take matters into their own hands. Netflix’s past docuseries Don’t Fuck with the Cats explored a similar phenomenon, and perhaps most infamously, Reddit took matters into their own hands during the hunt for the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber.

The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel examines the case of Elisa Lam, a twenty-one-year-old Canadian student who was found dead in a water tank atop the roof of the infamous Los Angeles Cecil Hotel. In Framing Britney Spears, the famous pop star's legal conservatorship is discussed, in which she hasn’t had free control over her person or estate for thirteen years. Both cases, while disparate in subject matter, attracted the attention of Internet sleuths, who become obsessed with the case, connect with fellow like-minded individuals online, and dissect any and all breadcrumbs that they can find — and in many cases, inventing something out of nothing to create what they believe are secret messages or pieces of evidence of a larger conspiracy.

The case of Framing Britney Spears is much tamer than Elisa Lam’s. For instance, Britney Spears has been in the public eye since she was a child on the Mickey Mouse Club. She is a bastion of modern celebrity, but even she deserves her privacy and a reprieve from the paparazzi that aggressively hounded her in the 2000s. But as Britney’s behavior was at times odd and at others, completely absent from public life, her fans began to question what was going on with her and the long-standing conservatorship. The podcast “Britney’s Gram” was born, in which hosts Barbara Gray and Tess Barker dissected everything the pop star posted on her Instagram page, searching for clues as to her real thoughts about the conservatorship. The #FreeBritney movement was also born around the same time, in which loyal fans took to the Internet and streets surrounding Britney’s court appearances to show their support.

The Elisa Lam story, however, is a much different, and tragic, set of circumstances, and it’s this I’ll focus on for the bulk of this piece. Elisa Lam’s death was made into spectacle following the bizarre elevator video footage that preceded her death, in which she darted suspiciously around the elevator and made unsettling motions with her hands and body. I’m going to say right here, at the outset, that the LAPD and the coroner ruled her cause of death as accidental and exacerbated by the fact she wasn’t taking all of her medications for her bipolar disorder. This case was truly a tragedy, and on a personal note, I was upset the Netflix documentary focused more on the spectacle of Internet sleuths over the chance to have a real, hard conversation about mental illness.

But, Netflix went the way of the Internet sleuths. After the video of Elisa in the elevator went viral, numerous individuals, vloggers, and YouTubers latched on, determined to beat the LAPD to the punch and solve what they immediately believed was a violent murder. The Internet sleuths pieced together anything they could find, including falsely blaming a musical artist named Morbid for the crime, just because he made death metal music and had stayed at the Cecil Hotel one year before Elisa ever stayed there. You can read more information about their search in this vein here, and Morbid thankfully did not succeed in taking his own life after the cyberbullying he received from these individuals. From there, the Internet sleuths took everything too far, even going so far as to blame Elisa’s death on a government conspiracy involving a tuberculosis outbreak on the neighboring Skid Row that happened right before Elisa showed up at the Cecil. In their view, Elisa was a biological weapon.

But it was when Elisa’s autopsy was made public that the Internet sleuths really doubled down. The autopsy directly contradicted what they had come to believe about the case, namely that it was not a murder, but rather, a tragic accident. Following the release, the sleuths took to their vlogs and said things like, “I’ve spent hours and hours investigating this, and I completely disagree with the coroner’s report” (says a man who has never examined the body himself). “Just because there were no marks on her body doesn’t mean it wasn’t foul play”; “For the online community this just meant there was an overarching coverup between the LAPD, the coroner, the general manager of the Cecil Hotel, and the employee who found the body”; “I’ve never read anything that said somebody having a bipolar episode would act like this.”

The Internet sleuths’ response to Elisa Lam’s autopsy is reminiscent of the famous New Yorker cartoon that says, “let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence.” So often when we speak of the current backlash against experts in many Western countries we (rightly) focus on things like environmental science, climate change, medical experts, and the COVID-19 pandemic. While Internet scholars, myself included, have long eschewed the idea that online practice should ever be thought of in terms of pathology, I’d like to talk about one specific “ism” here — solipsism. Solipsism essentially means it’s impossible to know something outside of yourself, so if you haven’t experienced it, or if you haven’t read it, you’re less likely to believe it.

At the start of the last decade, accusations of narcissism were thrown every which way at Internet practices, practically surrounding selfies and women. But as I and numerous other scholars have argued, narcissism is not only an incorrect term to describe online practice, but it is also an incredibly gendered, heteronormative, and racist cultural accusation. The Internet isn’t about obsessive self-love. Instead, in the fragmented information environment and filter bubbles we put ourselves in, solipsism becomes the cultural ethos. If it happens outside of my echo chamber, I don’t buy it.

But docuseries like The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and Don’t Fuck with the Cats demonstrate just how deep and wide this phenomenon goes, as well as the more troubling intersections of solipsism, sleuthing, and more — as scholar Stef Aupers argues, our current era, often dubbed “late modernity” by scholars, is characterized by a backlash against experts precisely because individuals feel let down by larger social structures and institutions and turn to a “trust no one” type of attitude.

Internet sleuths thrive within the “trust no one” environment. When individuals latch on to a particular case and find similar individuals, typically over the Internet, communities are born in which an echo chamber is formed around the idea. It seems no one can tell these individuals anything otherwise, because they are actively working together for the benefit and good of a situation that institutions have let down. Social media exacerbate these tendencies through speed, connection, and their hyper-discursive and affective natures, meaning that which tugs at the heartstrings and deep beliefs have the potential to be the most successful.

If this sounds like the QAnon conspiracy theory to you, you’re spot on. Scholars and pundits have long categorized QAnon as a racist, anti-Semitic, group of like-minded conspiracy theorists who dissect every possible piece of information made available to them for breadcrumbs and potentially hidden meanings. It largely makes something out of nothing, and as promised and expected things don’t happen, the goalposts continuously move to account for the non-events. I’ll leave most of the QAnon discussion to coworkers and fellow academics who focus specifically on alt-right politics and media, but run-of-the-mill Internet sleuths who focus on things like Elisa Lam or Britney Spears use many of the same strategies for analysis and finding information (though, it should be apparent by this point that the #FreeBritney individuals are much less toxic about their sleuthing than the Elisa Lam individuals and QAnon).

QAnon and the Internet sleuths surrounding Elisa Lam and Britney Spears are all part and parcel of a larger cultural moment, in which distrust is the common denominator. This is by no means an accident but a result in which individuals have routinely been let down or abandoned by macro-level social structures (disclaimer: this is not an apologist position for QAnon, but an assessment of the larger media and cultural landscape). As such, individuals turn to each other and the plethora of content afforded by social media. The infoglut and deluge of content mean the digital terrain is ripe for constantly trying to sort through information and find clues.

There is also a strong fandom component to all of these instances. Fan studies scholars have long been at the forefront of digital technologies and how fans were some of the early adopters of the Internet to coalesce around the thing they loved, or the fan object (another disclaimer: this, and nothing I’m about to say, is meant to pathologize fans or fandom, but rather, demonstrate how these practices have overlapped with fan communities). Here, the object of affection, or fan object, is Donald Trump (QAnon), Elisa Lam, or Britney Spears (my colleague at the University of Alabama speaks about this much better than I ever could). But the historical trajectory of fandom is important to not overlook in thinking through the practices of Internet sleuths. They feel a strong, affective drive for the cause they are pursuing (again, not an apology for QAnon. I have no patience for QAnon).

As an Internet scholar, something else that strikes me about Internet sleuths is their position in the broader digital media landscape. While QAnon has largely been banned from mainstream social media platforms, individuals are still able to discuss Elisa Lam and Britney Spears to their heart's content — and many times, do so for profit. Internet sleuths exist within a broader “attention economy,” in which successful content is that which attracts views, clicks, and likes. Internet sleuths capitalize on pain, suffering, and clue dissection for their own digital reputations and potential financial compensation from sites like YouTube. This is necessarily the ethical dimension to the problem, in which making something out of nothing can be beneficial or lucrative to outside observers.

So what do we do about Internet sleuths? They are by no means a new phenomenon, but their position has become louder, and with more material implications, in the twenty-first century. It is not necessarily a media literacy question either, since information sources are so fragmented, scattered, and hyper-partisan. It is, though, a question of approaching larger social structures. It is possible to realize one has been let down or abandoned by the world without necessarily thinking a larger conspiracy is afoot, and it’s at this intersection interventions must occur.

Additionally, and maybe this is just the Southern girl in me, it is a question of hospitality and respect. Britney Spears signed up to be in public life. Elisa Lam did not. But both women are deserving of dignity and respect. It also calls into question the divide Internet scholars have long eschewed — that the online and offline are entirely different. They are not. What happens online has tangible offline implications, and if there is a digital media literacy component to this at all, it’s that. In the case of Elisa Lam, it also involves respecting the fact a young woman died in a tragic way, and her family deserves for this not to be dragged out like this.

Internet sleuths are a symptom, not the problem. They exacerbate some of the most troubling cultural tendencies of our current moment, and we do need to reframe how we approach using Internet technologies to discuss interests. While the Internet sleuths in The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel recanted in the final episode, admitting they were far too conspiratorial, the damage had already been done. The best part of the Internet was that it brought like-minded individuals together who otherwise wouldn’t have met. When left unchecked, this became one of its worst parts, too.

If it sounds like Reddit’s upvoting and downvoting system, it’s because it's meant to. On the so-called “Front Page of the Internet,” Reddit users upvote, downvote, and award karma points for satisfactory and unsatisfactory content, often based on individual subreddit norms and values. Applying a similar system to fact-checking on a site like Twitter is a first, even though other sites have used similar tactics in the past.

Scholar Adrienne Massanari has written extensively on Reddit, as well as on its karma system. As she points out in her work, game studies is a useful framework for understanding Internet communities such as Reddit, and things like upvotes and karma reward and regulate “play.” But, as she also aptly discusses, this play is not unproblematic, and what play looks like often just upholds the status quo and ambivalence of Internet culture, particularly in that it is White, male, cisgender, and heterosexual.

With these points in mind, it is no wonder that in developing Birdwatch, Twitter has taken to classical ideas about public participation and conversation. By literally creating a forum to debate the merits of a claim, Twitter has turned Birdwatch into a marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of ideas is a legal framework for thinking about free speech. It abhors censorship and believes the best idea, or “truth” will emerge after robust debate. By debating claims and quite literally being able to help them rise through upvoting, Twitter’s approach to Birdwatch embodies the classic marketplace of idea tenets.

Scholars have pushed back on the marketplace of ideas metaphor for decades, arguing that free speech does not map onto economics. Such critiques have continued into the social media age. Additionally, the marketplace of ideas has more or less completely ignored the price of entry to public participation — women, people of color, and other marginalized groups are not always given an equal voice. It has also ignored how people are also pushed out of public life after being harassed.

So who will be the Birdwatchers? Right now, it’s first-come, first-serve. Who will be the people debating the merits and truthfulness of a claim? While Birdwatch says they’ve put fail-safes in, it’s easy to see how things could easily go sideways. While Twitter views the upvoting fact-checking as a deterrent to bad actors, they don’t seem to have taken into account how rewards and games are always political and always embroiled in larger issues and contexts.

Gamification has been on the rise in the last several years, as the ideas of competition, scoring, and rules of play have been applied to numerous areas of life, media, and technology. In general, gamification refers to game elements incorporated into non-game contexts For instance, Snapchat’s location-sharing app, Zenly, gamified shelter-in-place orders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Users competed with each other to earn points and see who could stay home the longest.

Birdwatch’s upvoting and downvoting system is essentially the gamification of a marketplace of ideas. And while my own work has consistently critiqued the marketplace of ideas for being an outdated, racist, and sexist model of public participation, I’m equally as horrified by the gamification of it — and I think the founders of the concept would be too. The gamification of the marketplace of ideas moves the idea of collective good to individual good, focusing on who can get the most points or upvotes. It pits individuals against each other and prioritizes points over the merits of a claim. Fact-checking, then, becomes secondary to winning. And given that we know both the marketplace of idea and gamification upholds White, male, cisgender, and heterosexual positions, Birdwatch risks upholding existing inequalities and inequities in favor of being a savvy PR move.

In an era where the basic tenets of reality can’t even be agreed upon, debate is not enough. Literacy is not enough. Both literacy and debate have been weaponized to support an individual’s own claims. Additionally, literacy and debate are individual solutions to systemic problems — which is exactly what Birdwatch is. Gamification is fundamentally individualistic. People want to win. The marketplace of ideas, while claiming to be collective, is also very individualistic considering who it allows in and who it excludes. By allowing users to debate the merits of claims and reward them with gaming metrics, Twitter absolves itself from its role in the systemic problem and instead leaves it up to individuals to fight it out for a few measly upvotes.

Will the Gamification of Fact-Checking Work? Twitter Seems to Think So was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was eleven on 9/11/2001. It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, and my mom put me on the school bus like she did every morning. But it was on that bus, sitting right behind the driver and her radio, that I heard my first inkling something had gone terribly wrong. I can’t remember what made me start paying attention to the driver’s radio, but the distinct phrases I’ll always remember was, “Everyone is running around. People are trying to get out. It’s like a scene from a movie.” It just was before nine AM, and the first plane had just hit the first tower.

We heard that phrase over and over again in the days, weeks, months, and years following 9/11 when people described their experiences: it was like a scene from a movie. Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard aside, who could and did say a lot about how mediated representations overtake our reality, the phrase was also a coping mechanism. It was a way for people to map something they understood (horrendous and tragic scenes from movies) to make sense of the horrific and unthinkable terrorist attack.

Twenty years later, I was (am) thirty years old and a researcher of visual social media cultures, platforms, and digital labor — which all relate to the nebulous concept of “digital popular culture.” And this was where I was, just finishing up speaking on a panel on popular culture and the COVID-19 pandemic, when I turned on the news and saw political extremists getting closer and closer to the U.S. Capitol. Like many of you all, I watched in horror as the afternoon of 1/6 unfolded live on my television. Then I watched and listened to the aftermath, the punditry, the news, and the takes about what had happened. This is what leads me to discuss what I’m writing about today.

Popular culture played a key role in what happened in the U.S. Capitol on 1/6/21, and it has played an equally important role in discussions thereof — but the latter occurs with a much more flippant tone.

Let me explain.

Media studies scholars, film scholars, television scholars, music scholars, American studies scholars, cultural studies scholars, humanistic communication scholars, and Internet scholars have been studying the importance of the “popular” for decades. Popular culture is an incredibly complex term with immense theoretical underpinnings and conduits for analysis. I won’t get into all of that here, but I will invoke my favorite quote about it from the father of Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall (1981): “Popular culture is the ground on which the transformations are worked…otherwise, I don’t give a damn about it.”

What any of the aforementioned scholars will tell you is that even though popular culture is often dismissed as trite, frivolous, or not worth studying, we know different. Popular culture is often where we see early signs of cultural, social, or ideological shifts. It can be where the debates occur over what a society values, and how it should value something. It can be a coping mechanism, either through retreating from the world temporarily, or using it to learn, react, process, and understand what is happening — like the 9/11 “movie scene” comparison.

Popular culture can also be a warning sign.

In dismissing popular culture as trite or frivolous, we ignore implications of its communicative forms, who may be communicating through it, or the seriousness of intent behind it. This is particularly damning and damaging when we speak of Internet popular culture and the vernacular, everyday, communicative nature of it. This brings me to 1/6.

Planning for 1/6 took place primarily on the Internet — in Parler and on Reddit, on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and DLive. People were talking about their plans, but they were also doing so with Internet logics, styles, and vernaculars. They interspersed their plans with memes and “funny” (to them) videos. And despite the warnings that have come for years from Internet scholars and some excellent Internet beat reporters, many pundits, politicians, and journalists did not take this seriously because it was “just” the Internet. After all, how dangerous could a meme of a creepy-looking frog named Pepe actually be? (Extremely). Too often in our conversations about the Internet, people with the power to speak and make decisions fall into an online/offline binary that treats the digital as “less than” or “less real” than offline, physical spaces. But every online action is tethered to a physical person, in a physical space, on a material, tangible phone or computer or tablet. The first, extremely small thing pundits, journalists, and politicians can do to reframe conversations about Internet action and practices is to do away with the notion that the online and offline are separate.

To be clear, online/offline binaries and ignoring Internet popular culture are not the only reasons 1/6 happened. 1/6 happened because political extremists, encouraged by the sitting U.S. president, made their choices. 1/6 happened because of security failures and how people in power did not act on given intelligence. 1/6 happened because of white supremacy, and the increased radicalization of white identity.

Some excellent Internet researchers have written on how these far-right groups use digital spaces and tactics to manipulate media, and I’d like to build on some of their work here. Media manipulation by the types of groups that stormed the Capitol take advantage of the infrastructure of networked cultures (like Parler, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube), communicative forms (like memes, YouTube, and TikTok videos), and strategic amplification to get their messages out across platforms and channels within platforms. Similarly, researchers have also looked at how journalists have been largely unprepared for covering these types of practices, belittling the digital instead of taking it seriously, and doing only cursory reporting instead of understanding the depth of the threat.

On 1/6, it was to the benefits of these groups that people don’t take these communicative forms and spaces seriously. This in and of itself is media manipulation by these groups — by being too strange, bizarre, and hateful to be taken seriously (pro-tip: take them seriously). Similarly, by being too vernacular, too “popular” (in the popular culture sense), and too seemingly “fringe,” the words and plans tied to the memes and TikToks weren’t taken seriously. This was also how these groups manipulated entire political and media ecosystems — by capitalizing on the idea that the popular is not meant to be taken seriously. Even as 1/6 was unfolding, journalists seemed largely unprepared to discuss what they were witnessing, and this carried over into discussing the fallout. Here are some recurring themes I noticed:

They stormed the Capitol…and made content? — The day after the insurrection, my Twitter feed was filled with people belittling those who stormed the Capitol because they did it and were filming and taking selfies the entire time. Once again, we see this online/offline magical thinking interfering with understanding the event. This group has been a primarily visual group for the beginning. The visual is an entire way of being online, not just something extra. For this group, there was no difference between the online/offline. Storming the Capitol had to have a simultaneous Internet component because the Internet had been embroiled in this from the beginning. This was also their goal, and they accomplished it. Of course they would document it.

One of my early pieces of research pushed back on the narcissism accusations surrounding selfie culture, instead of analyzing how journalists wrote about selfie deaths and accidents. I found that what many journalists were calling narcissism was actually exhibitionism, or extravagant behavior intended to attract attention to one’s self. While selfie-taking and online visual practices should never be reduced to any “ism,” exhibitionism is what I saw on 1/6 — the pinnacle and culmination of extravagant practices intended to draw attention to one’s self and their cause.

This was also a group that is deep in conspiracy. What do people think they need for evidence to prove their conspiracy? Visual materials. “The camera doesn’t lie” is an idiom that is deeply ingrained in all of us in Western culture (but cameras do lie, all of the time).

Fandom/Cosplay — I’m not a fan studies scholar, and there are probably better people to talk about this. But, one man in particular drew a lot of attention on 1/6 and in the days following it. The self-described “Q Anon Shaman,” wearing Viking-esque clothes and war paint was in the middle of storming the Capitol, and yet again, as this unfolded, jokes were made about this man. He was not the only to dress up, but he was one of the more prominent figures featured. People familiar with the far-right Internet instantly recognized him and the character he plays in the Q Anon conspiracy. Additionally, by not taking his costume seriously as the insurrection literally unfolded before our eyes, pundits continued to trivialize popular culture and ignore things such as, say, how white supremacists have co-opted and misappropriated much of Viking iconography.

Similarly, costumes and cosplay contribute to media spectacle, or how an event gets covered totally and completely by the media. This isn’t new — the white sheets and hoods of the KKK were always designed to contribute to media spectacle and draw continued attention to a cause. These wardrobe choices were similar on 1/6.

“Dark corners of the Internet” and “Dank memes” — I think I’ve already touched on these in the opening of this piece, but I never want to hear the phrase “dark corners of the Internet” again. These groups did not come from the dark corners of the Internet. They came from Facebook groups and YouTube channels. They came from Instagram posts and popular subreddits. They were not from fringe corners of the web. While they were storming the Capitol, some YouTubers were live streaming and using the site’s fundraising feature to raise money. These people were front and center and in the light of the day the whole time, and we chose to put ourselves in a corner, turn off the lights, and pretend not to see them. Similarly with memes — just because an idea is communicated via a meme doesn’t mean it’s not serious.

There are many, many things the United States needs to do to make sure an event like 1/6 never happens again. I’m not an intelligence expert or a security expert. But I do know the way our contemporary media ecosystem has talked about and engaged (or not) with Internet popular culture has played a role in this. We need to reframe the way we talk about Internet popular culture, and I suggest we start with getting rid of the online/offline distinction (which Internet scholars have been saying for decades). We need to take seriously people’s preferred methods of communication and expression and understand that just because it’s an image macro with a frog or a gorilla doesn’t mean it’s simply for fun. Where do we go from here? How do we change? With ourselves first. With checking our privilege, listening to the Internet experts and people of color who have warned about this for years, and understanding that on the Internet, nothing is ever just “for the lolz.”

1/6 and Popular Culture: Some Reflections was originally published in The Shadow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Internet immediately took to Champ and Major, as it is want to do when it comes to adorable pets and animals. The hashtag and label DOTUS (Dogs of the United States) took off, and fan accounts popped up on Instagram and Twitter to document the incoming First Dogs’ shenanigans.

I’ve spent the last several years deep in the communities and cultures of the Internet’s pets and animals (and am currently writing a book on this for Rutgers University Press), so I knew the love for the President-elect’s dogs wasn’t just they were an added bonus for those feeling victorious about Donald Trump’s electoral college and popular vote defeats (though, it was probably a little of that). The love for the First Dogs-elect is emblematic of the larger relationship between pets, animals, and digital cultures, and it comes at a time when pets and cuteness have become intertwined with finding joy online.

A common refrain on social media, be it Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, goes something like this: “Bad day. Send pet pics.” “Feeling crummy and could really use some adorable animals as pick-me-ups.” Buzzfeed, specifically Buzzfeed Pets and BuzzFeed Animals, has adopted a similar listicle strategy of compiling cute pictures of animals in the name of “boosting your serotonin.” Obviously, cute pictures of animals and pets can make people smile and feel better. But this social media maneuver underscores something rather optimistic I’ve found in my research into the internet’s pets and animals: We’re actually willing to take care of each other online.

Similar common sayings found on the internet include things like “Hell is other internet people,” or “the Internet is a dumpster fire.” Given the partisan politics, misinformation, abuse, harassment, doxing, filter bubbles, trolling, and hate speech populating the modern web, it is no surprise these sentiments persist. But why do we do stay? Why do we stay online? To be sure, a lot of people don’t, and they’re often driven offline by this abuse. But we also find joy in our digital practices, and we work together with people we know — and sometimes those we don’t — to make our digital spaces habitable.

Cute pictures of pets and animals aren’t the reason we stay online, but they certainly help make the experience better. In asking for these types of pictures after a bad day, we outsource our care and trust our friends and followers (who are sometimes complete strangers) to help us out — and most of the time, a large amount of people answer this call. This is also something I found in my interviews with people who run Instagram accounts for their pets — there’s so much toxicity online that being able to break that up with the occasional cute post to brighten someone’s day is one of the driving motivations for continuing pet Instagram accounts. There’s not a lot to be optimistic about online these days, but our willingness to try to cheer up our fellow humans through posting cute pet and animal pictures is just a little glimmer of positivity.

In our broader social media landscapes, social media featuring Champ and Major, or #DOTUS, is a similar reprieve when considering the type of content we became accustomed to during the Donald Trump’s presidency. Whether it was erratic tweetstorms at all hours of the night, or the dozens of tweets marked as misinformation in the wake of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, the joy and cuteness of First Dogs social media is a radical departure from the governing by tweet social media style of the Trump Administration. The First Dogs are cute. They’re wholesome. They’re hopeful. And they give us hope.

PS: I guess I can get rid of my subtly resistant “He doesn’t even have a dog” tank top now.

Why the Internet Loves the First Dogs-Elect was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While getting people to hopefully think twice before they retweet is a good thing, this move is merely a temporary band-aid that does nothing to fix the platform’s systemic issues that contribute to misinformation. Similarly, the move does very little to fix visual misinformation, and may actually contribute to an increase in that type of misinformation.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, visual misinformation is extremely common online, but aside from discussions of deep fakes, shallow fakes, and cheap fakes, the visual has not received much attention in this area. Visual misinformation consists of machine learning and artificially intelligent made video manipulations, but most often, it is simpler than that. Visual misinformation may consist of an edited photograph, something easy to accomplish given the proliferation and ease of learning photo-editing software. It may also consist of a photo taken from its original context and repurposed in another, which is where Twitter’s move has stark implications. Miscaptioning is a subtle, simple, but extraordinarily harmful form of misinformation.

Twitter is no stranger to visual misinformation. In 2016, a photo of Australian actress Samara Weaving was taken from her Instagram and spread across Twitter and Facebook. The photo, which the actress had taken in full bloodied makeup for her film Ash and the Evil Dead, spread with a caption saying, “the result of Fascism in America…simply because she was a Trump supporter.” The rogue post was picked up by accounts with large followings, such as Conservative Nation.

More recently, in summer 2020, the official White House Twitter account under Donald Trump tweeted a photo of bricks sitting on a city sidewalk, claiming “AntiFa and professional anarchists are invading our communities, staging bricks and weapons to instigate violence. These are acts of domestic terror. The victims are the peaceful protestors, the residents of these communities, and the brave law enforcement standing watch.”

But visual misinformation is not a partisan issue, with even former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton sharing a widely circulated photo in the same summer:

This photo was meant to criticize U.S. President Donald Trump during a period of unrest. As fact-checked by the BBC, they note that a reverse image search reveals the darkened White House photo was from 2014 and edited to look like the lights were out.

Twitter’s new move to curb misinformation focuses primarily on textual news. However, by prompting users to provide their own commentary before tweeting, they very well may fall into miscaptioning. On an optimistic note, maybe this would mean one would do some research or check before posting. But based on what we know about social media research in the area of misinformation and the speed at which content may go viral, many individuals post first, and check, if at all, second. This new move makes it far too easy to retweet a picture and share commentary on the image without necessarily knowing all of the facts.

Twitter has simultaneously implemented a warning before one retweets a news or magazine article, saying “headlines don’t tell the full story. You can read the article on Twitter before retweeting.”

Images are quite similar. We’ve heard the phrase, “the camera doesn’t lie,” but cameras and pictures both lie, all of the time. They don’t do so maliciously. But to frame is always to exclude, and in deciding what to photograph and what to not, in deciding which images to post and which ones to not, picture-sharers engage in fundamentally political, cultural, and ethical decisions. These choices are exacerbated by social media platforms, which we know officially now privilege more emotional, addictive content that breeds vitriol. And while Twitter has previously used “manipulated media” tags to note visual content that has been edited or may be out of context, manipulated media has become a partisan, hotly contested term. Many (conservative) pundits and politicians erroneously claim it is silencing technique by social media platforms. Manipulated media, like the temporary removal of the regular retweet, is only a band-aid from a platform ignoring its larger sociotechnical culture of misinformation.

Yes, visual misinformation can be shared with a simple retweet. But this decision to prompt commentary before doing so means many retweets now may be shared like a game of telephone — the message changes ever so slightly as it gets retweeted, before it bears no resemblance to its original context at all. When it comes to the ethics and fight against online misinformation, and visual misinformation, not all moves are equally good, and some may not actually be good at all.

And, as British internet journalist Chris Stokel-Walker so eloquently put it, “it is wild to me that tech is so US-centric that the world no longer has the ability to straight up RT a tweet because Americans can’t be trusted not to share disinfo before the election.”

Another day, another reason why we can’t have nice things.

Twitter’s Move to Prohibit Retweets May Make Visual Misinformation Worse was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, India banned 59 smartphone applications created by Chinese developers over security concerns. One of those 59 apps was TikTok, which has over 800 million active users worldwide, with 467 million downloads in India alone — meaning one-third of the video-sharing app’s downloads and users had once come from India. One week later, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S. was also considering banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, noting concerns on compromised user data. How did the app of Old Town Road, e-girls, and viral dances become the latest nexus of cybersecurity and geopolitical conflicts? It has a lot to do with questions of how countries bake their values into their technology, which platforms get regulated and how, and the role of other countries’ software in global internet markets.

Technology and social media platforms are far from neutral. They also have intricate and terse relationships with their governments of their operating country. This is nothing new. We’ve seen in this in the United States as a bipartisan issue as senators from Elizabeth Warren to Lindsey Graham have called for a breakup of Facebook. But as scrutinizing eyes turn to TikTok, questions specifically get raised about data privacy, and what TikTok — and potentially governments — do with user data. The problem is TikTok is the latest player in skirmishes between the U.S. and Chinese governments regarding technology and how tech products and platforms can serve as a form of “soft power” — the ability to appeal and gain access through attraction instead of coercion. The United States’ consideration of barring TikTok comes on the heels of a Huawei ban, as the U.S., and other countries such as India and those in the European Union, fear the closeness between the world’s number one telecom company and the Chinese government.

While an outright ban on TikTok seems improbable, it might not be a bad idea for the U.S. to regulate TikTok. Of course there is a relationship between TikTok, the Chinese government, and Chinese values and ideologies on privacy and expression, the same way these ideas interact in U.S.-based social media. To be clear, this is a criticism of China’s tech policies, not their people. TikTok has routinely come under fire for censorship of pro-LGBTQ content, shadowbanning content related to India-China border skirmishes, and prohibiting videos mentioning Tiananmen Square, the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and China’s persecution of ethnic minorities. Within China, the company was reprimanded by Chinese media watchdogs for allowing “unacceptable” content of teenage pregnancies. Given that values exist at all levels of a technology, China’s tense relationship with types of content on TikTok means it is worthwhile to consider how their views on privacy and expression may influence user data.

But the issues surrounding TikTok are less about content and more about data privacy (though conspiracy and extremist content on the video-sharing app is on the rise and should be dealt with). However, popular discourse questions bans and regulations of TikTok, wondering if it TikTok’s scrutiny is just xenophobia, a desire for U.S. social media and tech companies to attempt to squash a global competitor, Donald Trump’s hurt feelings of the TikTok teens and K-pop stans crashing his much-touted Tulsa campaign rally (though, be skeptical of this narrative), or, some actual threat.

The answer is a little bit of all of the above. But since there have been so many questions about what, if any, data security violations TikTok and China have committed, I thought I’d outline the concrete instances that make people worried:

· In April 2020, developers realized TikTok’s content delivery systems, and the systems that send their data back to their servers, were being sent via HTTP, not HTTPS. This means user data was not encrypted when it was sent back to TikTok’s servers, and unencrypted data is easier to hack and access by outside parties.

· TikTok collects more data than Facebook could ever dream of and dwarfs anything we saw with the likes of Cambridge Analytica. So the app collects, and then does not protect, user data on phone hardware, other apps you have installed, network information, GPS and location tags, in addition to email addresses, birth dates, and the commonly available information we provide when signing up for something.

· So, TikTok collects more data, and it does so unsafely. These concerns are then augmented by data localization laws, which mean that countries can require data to be stored within their territories and that data may be subject to those countries’ laws. This is the biggest crux of the popular discourse around any TikTok bans and regulations. While there is currently no evidence TikTok is handing data over to the Chinese government, many people are afraid that one, this is occurring without us knowing, or two, it could happen one day. These fears aren’t just based in xenophobia (though for certain individuals, it might be), but technological precedent. We’ve seen this before with Apple, when the company agreed to the Chinese government’s demands that iClouds be stored state-controlled data centers. Apple acknowledged in their decision that this meant they could not guarantee data security and privacy to their Chinese customers. This is why data sovereignty is so important (more on this later).

· The Chinese government does currently have a massive hoard of international data user, much of which stems from the Equifax breach and the hack of the Office of Personnel Management. This “data-hoarding” of information about U.S. persons can contribute to the Chinese government’s use of international individual data for intelligence and security purposes.

· Many people cite the Apple iOs14 copy/paste bug as a sign we’re overreacting to TikTok’s data usage and privacy concerns. You can read more about this here, but basically, there was a bug that allowed applications on your phone to copy and paste content from your phone’s clipboard. While it seems this bug was present for several apps, TikTok was particularly sloppy about this. While this bug has been fixed, TikTok’s messiness with the bug, and how long they seemed to know about it, is just another symptom of a larger problem we also see with the likes of their unencrypted data.

But U.S. social media does shady things to censor content and is irresponsible with our data! Yes, they do, and yes, they are. But here’s a thought — what if we held more than one thought in our head at a given time and discarded this “whataboutism”? What if instead of replying to any critique of TikTok with “what about Facebook?” we realized that both do horrible things and took this as an opportunity to understand why social media regulation is so needed, particularly in a global market and on a global internet?

So what does this mean? What do we do? Below, I outline some things we may see as the U.S. government may attempt to regulate TikTok — but the fact of the matter is, many of these are just good ideas for social media regulation in general, particularly regarding U.S. social media companies.

Availability

Who should use TikTok? As we consider the complicated questions of how data may be used or misused, it is prudent to think about who may be the most vulnerable. Here, it may be useful to go back to the not-so-distant past — remember FaceApp? FaceApp was fun app that could make you look older or swap your gender. It was all the rage from 2017–2019, before everyone found out it was based in Russia. On the heels of that panic, the FBI investigated FaceApp, and they found in general, there was no evidence that FaceApp gave user data to the Russian government. However, they did that warn that those with high-profile names, those who work for companies with sensitive IP, or those who work in the intelligence services — as well as anyone in their immediate families — should avoid using the app. Presumably, similar advice could apply to TikTok in this scenario. Lawfare blog has a an excellent post on the matter of TikTok and national security, and it clearly outlines concerns about either using TikTok when you’re in a potentially security compromised position, or using TikTok on a work phone.

Transparency

One key thing TikTok regulation could spur would be greater transparency. If TikTok was willing to disclose more regarding issues of ownership and partnership stakes, it would become more apparent as to where data was being sent. To be fair, TikTok has begun to combat these perceptions and issues by opening their first “Transparency Center” in the United States. The new facility would allow outside experts to view how TikTok operates on a day-to-day basis, with a specific focus on content moderation. And while TikTok has released “Transparency Reports,” these reports and proposed center focus on content, not user data and privacy. It will be interesting to see how this Transparency Center actually functions, who gets to be an outside expert, what they are allowed to see, and what they are allowed to report. Such a move has striking similarities to Facebook’s announcement of an Advisory Board to help with online safety. However, one Transparency Center may not be enough. Since this initiative was publicized by TikTok U.S. general manager Vanessa Pappas as a new facility in their existing Los Angeles offices, it is worth questioning whether this is a separate area outside of normal, day-to-day operating spaces. Regardless, the Transparency Center raises more questions than answers. If it proves useful, it could be a beneficial step in U.S. social media regulation. Only time will tell.

Divestment

The U.S government has launched a national security review of TikTok — but more specifically, they have launched an investigation into TikTok’s Beijing owner, ByteDance. ByteDance first launched Douyin in China in September 2016, and they released TikTok to numerous non-U.S. markets the following year. After merging with the U.S.-based Music.ly in 2018, TikTok became available to the U.S. market. Specifically, the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is currently reviewing the Music.ly acquisition, and CFIUS claims TikTok did not seek approval from them when making the deal. This is what allows the panel to have oversight over the matter now. Potential outcomes from the committee could include divestment which would separate ByteDance, TikTok, and Music.ly in the U.S. This isn’t novel– in early 2019, CFIUS informed the Beijing-based Kunlun Tech they had to divest their ownership in Grindr, a U.S.-based popular gay dating app that it had owned since 2016. Kunlun is currently searching for a buyer, but this creates precedent for the U.S. requiring some form of split between TikTok and Music.ly, or any Chinese ownership of TikTok in the U.S (it’s important to note that in China, TikTok operates as Douyin, and it runs on separate servers with separate content moderation policies to adhere to Chinese censorship laws).

Data Literacy

Data literacy is less of a federal regulation and more of a social one. One of the biggest problems facing any regulation of TikTok comes from the fact TikTok is so engrained in popular culture that it will be difficult to reign in. While a common misconception is youth don’t care about privacy — research shows they do — it is still difficult for individuals to negotiate something concrete that brings them joy with something that feels abstract, like data privacy. Getting people of all ages to understand the importance of and right to data privacy is one of the most pressing media literacy challenges of our time. Many individuals of all ages have rather defeatist attitudes to companies accessing their data — well, they already have it, they’re already listening, so what’s the point? The point is, while data is the fundamental building block of social media companies and economies, we can still demand platforms treat it ethically, safely, respectfully, and fairly. We can, and should, demand better of our social media platforms. We should read user agreements. But more specifically, we should make it so the onus of conveying information regarding data use is on the social media platform, and not the user to seek it out.

Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty is the idea that any data are subject to the laws and governance within the nation it is collected. In other words, as the U.S. considers a TikTok ban, data collected via TikTok, even though it is a Chinese-based company, would have to adhere to U.S laws regarding collection. This isn’t unheard of, and it’s largely the basis for the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. The GDPR, which was passed in 2016 and implemented in 2018, protects user data and privacy in the EU, as well as what happens with personal data that could be transferred outside of the EU and the European Economic Area. Regulations like GDPR protect individuals who may be engaging with social media apps outside of their territory, and in the global internet era, this protection is necessary. With everything going on with TikTok right now, the video-sharing app is naturally on the EU’s radar.

While something like the GDPR could help protect U.S. TikTok users without a ban, it is highly unlikely the United States will ever create such a regulation. The U.S. remains outside of such GDPR-style regulations for several reasons. First, GDPR is exactly the type of regulation Silicon Valley social media companies balk at, claiming any such intervention like this would stifle their innovation. In April 2018, as Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Congress on his own data scandal of Cambridge Analytica, he specifically argued against regulation, noting that intervention would strengthen Chinese tech companies. By claiming an alleged strengthening of China, Zuckerberg tapped into existing fault lines in the U.S-China technological and geopolitical quagmire.

The second problem is any U.S. ban on TikTok would inevitably lead to discussions of regulation of U.S.-based social media companies. And as previous data scandals like Cambridge Analytica show, the United States still has a way to go in combatting malicious uses of data and protecting user privacy. All of this is what made me pause when Mark Zuckerberg called out China and TikTok for censoring the 2019 Hong Kong protests, asking “is this the internet we want?” I don’t know, Mark, is it? The false myth of neutral tech seems to only apply to the white elites in Silicon Valley, not their global competitors. But Facebook and other U.S. social media companies bring their values into their products all of the time, and this too applies to data, privacy, and expression. Silicon Valley balking at regulation is one of the reasons we get something like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in the first place. With minimal-to-no oversight, U.S. based social media might be just as hands off as China is hands on.

So sure, the United States should regulate TikTok. But we should clean up our own house too.

The U.S. should regulate TikTok — but it should clean up our own house, too. was originally published in Digital Diplomacy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.