TV Meets Fruit Machine

In​ the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well formatted for what had become the world’s most popular interface, the vertical smartphone screen. And while the existing platforms were well designed for watching and sharing videos, they were less user-friendly when it came to creating and editing them. TikTok, which ByteDance unleashed on the world in 2017, rectified both these shortcomings. Its declared mission was to ‘inspire creativity and bring joy’. TikTok made it easy to edit and recombine content, and to mix video, audio, text and graphics – perfect for lip-synching to audio clips or performing dance routines to pop songs. Its interface was minimalist, giving over as much of the screen space as possible to the video itself.

TikTok was the world’s most downloaded app in 2020. Its political potential became plain that summer, when it was instrumental in distributing participants’ coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the largest civil rights mobilisations in US history. A year later, it had a billion active users worldwide. Today, it is the fifth most popular social media platform, behind Instagram (with which it is catching up fast), WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube, but it distinguishes itself from the others in a number of potent and potentially disruptive ways. The majority of TikTok’s users are in their teens or twenties; for this demographic it is an increasingly important window on the world. In the UK, according to Ofcom, TikTok is now the leading source of news for children aged 12-15. In line with its original mission statement, TikTok’s users are unusually creative: one study found that of those users who comment on videos (the most engaged user group), fewer than 20 per cent have uploaded five or more videos to YouTube, compared to nearly 80 per cent on TikTok. Some 34 million videos are uploaded to the platform every day, most of them less than twenty seconds long.

But assessing TikTok via a league table of social media platforms misses its more profound impact, which has been to disrupt the very meaning of ‘social media’, through the influence its design has had on its competitors and on the wider media ecology. When social media took off in the mid-2000s, it was based on the idea of connecting people with their friends, former classmates, potential dates and business contacts. By the early 2010s, social media platforms still retained this function, but had also become valuable tools for curating ‘feeds’ of information, news and entertainment. ‘Subscribing’, ‘liking’ and ‘following’ granted the user control over what and whom they encountered online.

TikTok too allows users to build connections with one another, but this is secondary to a more enticing feature. The ‘For You’ page, on which every user lands when they first open the app, provides a portal to a galaxy of tantalising novelties and curiosities, each presented without context or any explanation as to why it has been selected. The For You feed is curated by an opaque recommendation algorithm, which churns through billions of data points drawn from users’ behaviour, few of which anyone is conscious of or chose to communicate. Every video shown in the For You feed is a micro-experiment that tests the response of a user (not least, whether they watch or skip, and how much of a video they watch before skipping), and influences the selection of the next one up. Skipping is as easy as an upwards swipe. Meanwhile, every new video uploaded is guaranteed to be shared on at least one other user’s For You page, holding out the slim possibility that it might prove popular. This adds another seductive ingredient, the faint prospect of celebrity.

Put all this together, and you have an irresistible interface. The For You page, where TikTok users are known to spend 69 per cent of their time on the app, offers an infinite succession of different clips, some comical, some dull, others uncannily well suited to the user’s interests. Some are worth watching, some are worth sharing, many more can be skipped – and all of this is data to be fed back into the recommendation machine. For You combines two of the most addictive technologies of the 20th century: the fruit machine (which plays with our anticipation as to what will pop up next) and television. Among the many concerns about TikTok is the sheer amount of time it devours: the average British user dedicates more than 42 hours a month to watching videos which rarely last longer than thirty seconds. Its status as the most popular social media platform among teenagers adds to the continuing unease over the effects of screen time on young people’s wellbeing and attention spans.

Facebook and, to the fury of users, Twitter had already started manipulating the visibility and ordering of individual posts long before TikTok came along. But TikTok’s sudden success tipped its rivals into outright mimicry: Instagram’s ‘Reels’ and ‘YouTube Shorts’ were both launched in summer 2020, straightforwardly copying the For You template. Between them, these three platforms have now secured near hegemony over the most significant media innovation of the past decade: the algorithmically curated multimedia short clip, formatted for a vertical smartphone screen.

Handing so much power over to algorithms is a proven basis for entertainment, not to mention a rich source of behavioural insights to be monetised in the advertising market. But it has had some disconcerting effects on the wider public sphere, if we can still speak of such a thing. For the last few years, users of Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have noticed that a rising proportion of what they are shown on these platforms comes from sources they have never ‘followed’, ‘liked’ or ‘subscribed’ to. Some of it will be inane, some of it shocking; much of it will be infuriatingly hard to ignore. This is what the media scholars Benjamin Guinaudeau, Kevin Munger and Fabio Votta have referred to as ‘virality from nowhere’: somehow, the videos in question are racking up good numbers in the attention economy even though users have no sense of how or why they came to be shown to them. The turn to algorithmic curation has become known as ‘TikTokisation’, whereby the goal of every platform is to keep serving up whatever content seems likeliest to retain a user’s attention for another few seconds, no matter how useless, weird or unpleasant.

TikTokisation deepens an already existing anxiety about the decline of text-based news consumption (manifest not only in falling newspaper sales, but slackening attention to online news sources as well). As early as 2001, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein expressed his fear that the internet would be a cause of political ghettoisation. Algorithmic curation is a powerful mechanism for realising that fear. The political and media theorist Paolo Gerbaudo has argued that platforms such as TikTok shrug at liberal ideals of a diverse and shared public sphere, accelerating our drift towards ‘clustered publics’, in which parallel communities are generated around niche interests and identities, but whose governing logic (what distinguishes the cluster and where its boundaries lie) can never be known.

There is another familiar worry, that social media platforms have an inbuilt propensity to push extreme content, with the result that users are lured into the hands of the radical and far right. This too is an anxiety that predates TikTok. It came to a head in 2016 when Facebook was blamed by many for pushing voters towards Brexit and Donald Trump, having pumped out fake news that played to their resentments. Platforms that are designed to maximise views and clicks have an incentive to elevate divisive and transgressive content, since it is harder for users to ignore and (ample research now shows) is more likely to reap ‘engagement’ in the form of likes, comments and shares. In the last six months, to take just one example, 4chan and X have been responsible for the rise of a racist meme that has spilled over into other forums: references to ‘yookay’ as a shorthand for lawless multiculturalism, evident in the behaviour of Muslims and black men especially.

There is no reason to believe that TikTok is any worse than other platforms when it comes to the promotion of nationalists and hate-mongers, but also no reason to believe it is any better. Silicon Valley’s pivot towards MAGA politics has brought high-profile announcements from X and Facebook in support of ‘free speech’ (in practice, reduced moderation of conspiracy theorists and racists), but the underlying problem with all these platforms is the business model, which computes everything in terms of engagement metrics, in order to keep users in the app. TikTok (and ‘TikTokisation’) is even more problematic in one respect, though, which is that it is harder to know what’s going on in other parts of the forest. It used to be said that Facebook, as distinct from Twitter, allowed people to step outside their own filter bubble because they continued to connect with their relatives, old schoolfriends and others who might inhabit very different cultural and political milieux. But dwelling in an endless stream marked For You makes it harder to see what is being curated for anyone else.

Earlier this year, Global Witness attempted to get around this by studying the political content showing up on the For You pages of newly registered accounts in Germany. The researchers set these accounts to follow the four largest political parties, thereby giving the algorithm initial evidence that these ‘users’ had a strong interest in politics. After clicking on the top five posts from each of these parties, they then let the algorithm decide what should appear on the For You feed. They discovered that 78 per cent of subsequent content was supportive of the AfD, suggesting what they described as ‘political bias’ in the algorithm. That is one possible conclusion. Another is that there is simply more AfD-supporting content in circulation, and that AfD supporters spend more time on the platform, thus boosting the circulation of the stuff they like to watch. But without the co-operation of the platform itself, it is impossible to know exactly what is going on.

Another way to approach this is to look at the online profiles of leading political figures and parties. The Guardian has found that Reform gets fourteen times more engagement per post on TikTok than any of the other main political parties. Nigel Farage has as many followers on TikTok as all other MPs combined. (Less than a quarter of Labour MPs and only a handful of Tory MPs have TikTok accounts, in part due to the restriction on using the app on official devices.) The left isn’t completely out of the picture, but it is its anti-establishment figures who have gained a foothold: Zarah Sultana is the second most followed MP and Jeremy Corbyn the third, both of whom were recently ejected from the Labour Party. The fact that TikTok is a platform dominated by the young, and the young still tend to lean left in the UK (relative to their parents and grandparents) ought to make it tricky territory for Farage. Conversely, to the extent that Faragism is developing a youth wing, TikTok is likely to be playing a significant role in that.

Studying TikTok accounts is a useful way of finding out what kinds of message political parties might be pushing, away from the mainstream media. Reform MPs, for example, have dedicated a fair amount of energy to online promotion of a parliamentary petition to ‘protect Northern Ireland veterans from prosecution … for doing their duty in combating terrorism’. (The petition has now passed the crucial threshold of 100,000 signatories, which means it will be debated in Parliament.) But to focus so much on political representatives is to miss what is going on with the people they represent, who are of course creating most of the videos that appear on the app. What makes this medium so powerful is its atmosphere of direct democracy (or what Gerbaudo refers to as the ‘plebeian public sphere’), in which the spotlight is shared by everyone. Far more than YouTube, which is dominated by offline institutions, celebrities and big-name influencers, TikTok is like a talent show with 1.6 billion contestants.

Earlier this year​ , I created a TikTok account in order to get a sense of what Farage and Reform were circulating online. I began by scrolling through the videos on their own accounts, and after that watched what came up on the For You feed. I shared nothing about myself, although the algorithm will have picked up on when, where and via which operating system I was using the platform. It will also have monitored which clips I watched and when (if at all) I swiped to skip. (Depending on your privacy settings, TikTok, like other social media platforms, can collect information about you from third parties, including other apps and websites.) The difficulty in attempting to study this medium critically, let alone scientifically, is that every time you open the app you betray details about yourself, as every action, or lack of action, influences what you see next. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ in a system that is constantly being tweaked around the behaviour of the viewer. With that caveat, my For You page illuminated something of the world to which Farage speaks.

I was shown clips of policemen and women asking not to be filmed. Clips of masked men cutting down Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras with angle-grinders. Clips of supermarket shelves displaying inflated new prices. Clips of fights breaking out in the street. But above all, clips of men and women addressing their phones while sitting in cars or out walking, lamenting the state of ‘Starmer’s Britain’, their words appearing in TikTok’s distinctive pink-highlighted font. ‘I need help: someone tell me why this country is such a fucking joke?’ demands a man sitting in his car, who is sure his energy company is scamming him. ‘Have you had enough?’ asks a woman, also in a car, but without explaining what we might have had enough of. A man holds up his Greggs coffee, and asks viewers to leave a comment guessing how much he just paid for it. ‘How are we not in a civil war?’ asks one woman. Another man walks through woodland, in despair at the amount of tax he is paying for government ‘waste’. The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value. This gloom is punctured only by those who have managed to emigrate or develop successful side-hustles, escaping the constraints of what (to all appearances) is an irredeemably bleak and dishonest society. As with the ‘yookay’ meme, love of nation has flipped into hatred of it.

Racism, especially Islamophobia, is impossible to avoid in Farage-adjacent TikTok. Some of it is imbued with nationalist melancholia, the screen dotted with Union Jacks, clips of wartime heroics interspersed with laments for what the country has become. Some of it is didactic, explaining to the viewer where Islam originated, and the dangers it supposedly presents. A counterpoint is provided by a few (non-Muslim) TikTokers, who take it on themselves to describe Islam in more sympathetic terms, apparently in an effort to temper the resentments and misunderstandings in their own community. Then there is content more in keeping with the platform, which uses humour, clips of pop songs and mashed-up graphics to lampoon the asylum system, with Starmer the butt of most of the jokes.

The anti-migrant common sense in this world has relatively little to do with headline statistics – which the Home Office is trying to cut by limiting the numbers of overseas care workers and students, regardless of demand – and everything to do with perceived illegality and fraud. There is a simple narrative, which goes roughly as follows. Young men are crossing the Channel in small boats, exploiting a naive asylum system and the generosity of the British state in order to get housing. Those who don’t get housing get put up in expensive hotels instead. This influx of migrants pushes up the cost of everything, and diverts money from honest citizens, including the recipients of winter fuel payments, who go cold and hungry as a result. No doubt there are more extreme, exotic or intellectualised forms of ethno-nationalism on social media, built on grander conspiracy theories, but Reform doesn’t need them. A folk wisdom that gestures loosely towards fraud, asylum, government waste and welfare cuts is what resonates for Farage.

In her recent ethnographic study of Mansfield, the former mining town where 71 per cent of voters backed Leave in the Brexit referendum, the sociologist Sacha Hilhorst discovered that many local residents viewed politics entirely through the lens of ‘corruption’. To this way of thinking, there are plenty of decent people in the world, who look after one another and obey the rules, but politicians are not among them. On the contrary, success in politics is a matter of rule-breaking and rampant self-interest, and power is exploited solely for personal enrichment. (A variant of this mentality manifests in online claims that Volodymyr Zelensky is a liar who wants more of British taxpayers’ money so he can build up his fleet of luxury cars.)

Hilhorst was probing attitudes to politics specifically, but Faragist TikTok is awash with a similar suspicion, captured in the idea of the ‘scam’, of which government, politicians, asylum seekers and big business are all equally guilty. Government raises taxes on the pretence that it will look after people, but instead ‘wastes’ it through inefficiency or misappropriation. Businesses keep on hiking prices, in ways that suggest something fishy is going on. One TikTok video shows a man comparing how much a toilet roll costs in the supermarket to how much it costs when bought in bulk: clear evidence of a scam. Robert Jenrick recently released a video of himself wandering around Stratford tube station confronting fare-dodgers (more scammers), which included a gnomic reference to streets full of ‘weird Turkish barbers’. In fact, this was a reference to another alleged scam, rumours of which have been circulating on TikTok and YouTube for months, according to which Albanian gangs are setting up ‘Turkish barbers’ as fronts for money laundering. Reform has promised to look into it.

Some of this can be called out as ‘racism’; some of it borders on ‘conspiracy theory’. There are plenty of far-right influencers who peddle in both, some of whom make large amounts of money doing so. But where the stereotypical image of the conspiracy theorist is a hyper-self-confident man, explaining to the ill-informed how everything links up, the TikTokers sitting in their cars exude mainly anger, suspicion and exhaustion, directed towards a political and economic system they believe is ripping them off. There is a risk of making over-generous interpretations of the radical right’s appeal, and there are those who would say that to listen to someone’s ‘concerns’ is always to legitimate them. (This critique has particular bite in the UK: in one egregious example, the former political scientist of the radical right Matthew Goodwin was radicalised by his own subject matter, to the point where he now publishes YouTube videos about the ‘invasion’ of Britain and gives Reform stump speeches declaring ‘I want my country back.’) But although anti-migrant sentiment obviously didn’t begin with the post-Covid cost of living crisis, it is hard to miss the degree to which the two have become mutually entangled.

As an economic doctrine, liberalism rests on a simple promise: that market exchanges make both parties better off. The baker earns money she can spend, while the consumer gets bread he can eat. In the labour market, this is expressed in the idea of an ‘honest’ wage for an ‘honest’ day’s work (Marxists have quibbled with the former). Farage exploits a diffuse sentiment that dishonesty is now the basic principle on which not only politics but also markets function. Why have basic goods suddenly shot up in price? How can the young men from that other community afford to drive such nice cars? Why does the government claim to have no money, when it is sending billions to Ukraine and putting foreigners up in hotels? The simple, transparent equilibrium of the market has been replaced with the opaque disequilibrium of value extraction – or what might otherwise be called a scam.

This is, at least in part, what happens in a capitalist society when profits remain high but productivity and wage growth stagnate. Things no longer add up. For many, work no longer pays well enough to secure a family existence. Someone somewhere is clearly getting richer, but it isn’t clear how or why. You can find a steady stream of practical advice on TikTok about how to scam the system yourself, through online shopping platforms that the supermarkets don’t want you to know about, or investment strategies and side-hustles that will pay better than your day job. In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken society with better weather. In contrast to the ‘win-wins’ of market liberalism, this all smacks of zero-sum Trumpian deal-making, in which one party wins because the other loses.

The TikTok algorithm, and TikTokised platforms in general, operate by creating a feedback loop between individual behaviour and content curation. If your eye pauses for a few extra micro-seconds on a given bit of content, this will increase the chances that more such content will be served up in future. But we might also speak of a collective feedback loop at work in a media ecology operating according to the logic of For You pages, in which the attention given to ‘mainstream’ media declines and people are sorted into smaller, more concentrated and more suspicious ‘clustered publics’. Since 2013, the proportion of adults in the UK and US who consume no conventional news media at all has risen from 8 per cent to 30 per cent. Many of the people in this group may be using social media to follow celebrities, cooking or DIY accounts, or influencers talking about fashion or wellness. But a significant number will be regularly exposed to an algorithmically filtered vision of society that stokes resentments.

We are beginning to witness what happens when these algorithmically channelled resentments show up in mainstream politics. Aside from Jenrick’s nod to barbershops, Labour has made high-profile statements on topics that would baffle many listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme: cracking down on dangerous cycling and seizing (and crushing!) the vehicles of fly-tippers. That the government is finding time in its schedule to highlight these issues can only mean that they are coming up in the focus groups that Downing Street is said to be so attentive to. But focus group participants don’t tend to report what they see outside their front door; rather, they draw on narratives made available to them in the media. As recently as the Cameron era, that would have meant the press: Brexit was in part a triumph of newspaper owners and editors, who managed to convince the majority of the population that their enemy lay in Brussels. But the videos that go viral via For You pages are largely subterranean, until suddenly they break through into mainstream politics and media, apparently without context or explanation.

If the resentments fuelling and being fuelled by these videos are, at least in part, the result of economic conditions, then it would seem imperative to think about how the nature and effects of those economic conditions might be better communicated. In the past, the left insisted on the need for adult education, organic intellectuals, left-wing media and other forms of organising that might improve the public understanding of capitalism. The anger provoked by inflation around the world has had major political and electoral consequences, with incumbent parties ejected from office in most of the sixty national elections that took place in 2024. Inflation on the scale we have seen in recent years feels punishing and inexplicable to those whose income no longer covers basic needs.

Economics is hard enough to explain at the best of times, never mind in a thirty-second video. The one content creator attempting to do so who appeared on my For You page was Gary Stevenson, whose style and format (slickly produced videos, up to an hour long) is better suited to YouTube, where he has 1.3 million subscribers, than TikTok, where he has fewer than half a million. Even so, short clips of his occasional television appearances make for good TikTok content. Stevenson, a former Citibank trader, has been dismissed by many finance experts for the simplicity of his analyses and diagnoses, not to mention his boast that he was once the ‘best trader in the world’ (the Financial Times bulldozed this claim last year). But Stevenson cuts through, and it isn’t hard to tell why. His message starts from the common sense that injustice is endemic to modern capitalism, with the rich screwing the poor and governments letting it happen. The reason ‘you’ can’t afford anything is because ‘they’ (the very wealthy) are sitting on all the money. Another day, another scam. Stevenson’s brand of left populism is never going to be adopted by the current government, though a group of Labour MPs has approached him in an attempt to improve the party’s media strategy. The leadership should at least recognise that it’s possible to gain credibility in the Faragist media sphere without ever mentioning small boats, hotels or Turkish barbers.