34: This one is for Pot Roast
A lie about The Yodel Kid, yassifying the Eye of Sauron and more!
Welcome back to Night School!
Algorithm updates
As of March 7 2022, new community guidelines on TikTok will be put in place. Updates to the TikTok algorithm has been a prominent topic of discussion this week.
Some highlights:
Unoriginal & low quality content will not be pushed on the For You Page.
—> this will likely block spam content.
Static pictures and content with a watermark from other platforms will also not be pushed onto the FYP.
—> this is also most likely for the purpose of blocking spam content.
Over-sexualized content will not be pushed on the FYP.
The definition of “grooming” has been updated to block content that solicits minors to go to another platform or web page.
Read the updated TikTok community guidelines here.
Similarly, META has updated their ad targeting options to no longer allow keywords related to topics including causes, organizations or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation.
Accounts within spirituality TikTok have been posting content claiming “tarot”, “astrology” and “horoscopes” hashtags are being censored on both Instagram and TikTok, but this is a misunderstanding of the update because it is about paid ad targeting with keywords, not hashtags.
Golden tongs
They’re gold now.
Referring to what I would call a “Potato Bug” as a “Roly-Poly” reminded me of this American Accent map quiz from The New York Times.
RIP Pot Roast
Pot Roast the cat has sadly passed away. Pot Roast was adopted in 2014, had no teeth and was the beloved star of TikTok account @potroastsmom.
Last week the Internet was worried about Pot Roast after it was revealed that she had been diagnosed with FIV (Feline immunodeficiency virus) after having multiple emergency vet hospital visits. The following video was posted on February 8th as a response to “Pot Roast” becoming a trending topic on Twitter:
I can’t remember when I followed @potroastsmom but Pot Roast has been a regular feature on my personal feed for a couple years now and has been a welcome interruption to some of the truly cursed content that can be found while scrolling through the FYP. The videos tend to lean toward comedy.
In honor of Pot Roast I scrolled to the very beginning of @potroastsmom account and found the first video featuring Pot Roast which was posted on December 31 2020:
This is the first video I could find that seemed to have reached a high number of views:
This one.. well this one I just thought was cute:
And some Pot Roast lore:
This was posted on the 9th, explaining Pot Roast’s FIV diagnosis:
Toothless and ruthless:
Pot Roast was a source of comfort for many people. Rest In Peace Pot Roast.
A lie about the Yodel Kid
Okay let’s quickly jump back to 2018, when people of the Internet were losing their shit over a video of 12 year old Mason Ramsay yodeling “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams in a Wal-Mart.
Over the past few months on TikTok, Ramsey’s 2019 song Before I Knew It was trending and he has been posting videos on his TikTok account @masonramsey featuring moments from his daily life working at a sandwich and pizza restaurant.
Onto an experiment involving misinformation. @aiden4adderall posted the following video using the trending audio:
It was followed up with another video containing a static image of a tweet from Ramsey’s account that was allegedly posted in 2019:
Three days later the creator posted a video explaining they lied about the information, created a fake tweet and hid comments:
I’ll be honest, when scrolling through my “For You Page” and saw the initial video containing the “lie”, I believed it and I didn’t do any additional research beyond checking the comment section. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, the thought of “The Yodel Kid” donating a bunch of money to the Family Equality Council warmed my heart.
People lie on the Internet all the time, it’s nothing new or groundbreaking. That being said, despite all the ways that I could assert my media literacy expertise I embarrassingly am not immune to being fooled by content. It feels important to admit this especially as someone who studies Internet culture & reads media theory. Nobody is immune to misinformation given the right circumstances, it is even more insidious when it falls within one’s own feedback loop of content that supports and validates ideology, opinions, values, etc. Maybe discussing this here will only make me seem like a big dingus, but it felt like a good reminder of how easy it can be to consume content without questioning it too heavily.
For additional takes, @hankgreen1 made a TikTok about it.
EDIT: The videos and account have been removed from the platform, it is unclear if it was done by the creator or by TikTok.
P.S. I listened to Twang more than I’d like to admit while working on this issue of NS.
An out of context explosion
This next video has over 12 million views, it was posted on February 2. It has no caption, no hashtags and the user that posted it, @alexsand80, appears to only have one other video at the moment.
It’s not claiming to have been taken at a specific time or place, so it could have been filmed years ago or on the day it was posted. It’s interesting for this type of video to have reached such a high view count, though I’m sure the many comments that seek to understand it have pushed it to gain higher views within the algorithm. This type of video will often appear on the FYP creating confusion among viewers. It’s likely that it was simply posted for the views and it may be totally irrelevant to the current news/media cycle but it does add to a generally fearful “vibe” within TikTok’s For You Page.
Yassifying the Eye of Sauron
I don’t know how I feel about the trailer for the new Lord of the Rings series yet.
TiffyMohair vs. Supertanya
An Etsy Mohair Sweater exploration…
Sand Piper TikTok
I ended up on Sand Piper appreciation TikTok
To end this issue, here is a photo I took of graffiti on a bathroom wall from earlier this week:
Thanks for reading!