24: Your Final Rigatoni Reminder, Vine Energy and Highly Personal Content
This week had me questioning the platform, shareability and privacy.
Hello! Welcome to NS 24!
This week my feed was more difficult than usual. Before getting into it, I need to give a CONTENT WARNING for: pregnancy loss & death. The videos are at the end of this newsletter and have a clear warning beforehand.
This is your final reminder…
….to eat rigatoni on May 24 2021. For many months now, @daily.rigatoni.052421 has graced my FYP. I even included it in the 4th issue of Night School.
Here is a screen recording I took of the account:
All week I have been seeing reminders appear on my FYP, like the one below:
This Monday will be May 24th and you better believe I will be having a bowl of Rigatoni.
Mattress Mike
@mattressmike01 makes videos promoting a mattress business that according to his profile, offers free nationwide delivery.
This was the first video I saw:
Here’s another one, following a Garfield theme:
All his other videos are very similar to the ones I’ve featured here.
TikTok Marketing
While on the topic of marketing on TikTok… There is a new feature for creating paid promotions. Concerns have been raised about this feature being the “beginning of the end” of TikTok. I don’t believe this is the case but it will be interesting to see how content changes because of it. I am curious to see how it will impact visibility when posting without using the paid feature and to what extent the videos shown on the FYP will be different.
Cursed Squishies
I don’t want to know what kind of damage has been done to the sewing machine.
Big Vine Energy
The next two videos have big Vine energy. To have Vine energy, a video must be 6 seconds or shorter, have some kind of action involving unintended consequences and/or a single word catchphrase that is extremely repeatable.
For Marissa in NYC
Viral Audio
This video shows the evolution of a viral song on TikTok. I always find these useful to share. The original audio is: Cloud 9 by Beach Bunny.
CONTENT WARNING.
The final two this week are are sensitive in nature as they involve pregnancy loss, specifically a still-born baby. Do not watch, or watch with caution if this subject matter is triggering for you.
TikTok & humor as a coping mechanism
As the warning above indicates, the following two videos feature a woman who has just suffered a pregnancy loss. She made several videos, I am only sharing two. It is clear she decided to film with her baby in the way she needed to. While I have never been pregnant or gone through pregnancy loss, I do have a deep understanding of grief and the use of humor to cope. Grief humor can often be received as off-handed or flippant.
The video above uses the clown filter and a viral audio. Both are often used alongside text explaining a difficult or disappointing situation.
The audio used in the video below is a viral remix which uses the song Savage by Megan Thee Stallion and audio clips from Keeping up with the Kardashians.
When posting on TikTok, a creator has the ability to turn off sharing features including: comments, downloads, duets and stitches. The ability to easily share TikTok content feels uncomfortable especially when very personal content like this is posted publicly without many restrictions. The comments on these videos were turned off, but the ability to download was not. I wasn’t surprised to see comments turned off as controversial/sensitive videos are often met with extreme hate and insinuations of using tragedy for views.
What are your thoughts on this content, privacy settings and the shareability of TikTok?
Content palette cleanse: Cat Ballet
Thanks for reading!
To discuss, follow me on Twitter or send me an email: angela.shier@gmail.com