Week 9: Omegle, North Korea and a Taylor Swift Conspiracy Theory

Talking to strangers, forbidden and mystery content!

Another interesting week on the feed.

For the first time in about a year + of having TikTok, I had to shut it off briefly due to ~difficult~ content. I thought I’d mention it here because duh, this is about TikTok. It was an opportunity to contemplate what kind of content is too much for me and when it is time to take a break from consuming content. It highlights the jarring nature of the platform where you can go from silly animals to content that forces the viewer to contemplate mortality. I deeply appreciate the educational nature of the platform, but the unpredictable feed can certainly bite you. In this case I didn’t need to learn about the process of cremation in great detail nor did I need to see a graphic video about it on my feed. I would have happily gone my entire life without seeing it. Oh and no, I won’t share it here. Enjoy these videos instead:

Best parade ever

I want to go where they are going.

Don’t forget to wash your hands and feet

The Teens have discovered Omegle

Back in my college years I remember many nights going on Chatroulette with friends as a form of entertainment. Often we would see uncomfortable sexual content, rude people around our age, people in different countries or the occasional lonely individual looking for a chat. To this day a friend and I swear we saw Soulja Boy on one of the many Chatroulette nights. It was fun way to bond with new friends over strange and possibly unforgettable experiences. Omegle is similar but does not always require video, so you can chat with strangers in a text-based format instead. I often used it in attempts to generate ‘flarf’ poetry during my Alt Lit days on the Internet.

Screenshots of Chatroulette experiences resurrected from Facebook. These are from 2011, my first year at University:

Searching the Omegle hashtag on TikTok will lead you to countless videos. This one I thought was particularly funny:

This one feels forbidden

I need more context but I also feel as though I’ve just committed some kind of royal crime for viewing it.

I ended up on Lead Poisoning TikTok

These could do with some fact checking but I enjoyed having a Lead-centric day on TikTok this week.

Whatever this is

This one exemplifies the ability to create unsettling and mysterious content on TikTok that ends up receiving millions of views. It showed up on my feed with a caption in Russian(?) and minimal comments in English. Upon further research the audio is most likely the sound of a Bobcat screeching and does not go with the video itself. The combination is absolutely terrifying.

In Week 6, I mentioned the boat chase video in reference to drug cartel TikTok, it has since become a bit of a joke on TikTok to comment “I should never have liked that boat video” on these mysterious videos. Liking the boat video has seemingly directed user’s algorithms to give them similarly wild content.

Bobcats screaming:

North Korea TikTok.

The user @xhg1688 is allegedly a North Korean official account to post videos of daily life. This is another axample of “ever since I liked that boat video”.

This was the first video from the account that appeared on my feed:

Many others soon followed including this one:

A theory that Taylor Swift and Harry Styles committed vehicular manslaughter in 2013

This is a wild theory that I find quite funny. Searching “vehicular manslaughter” on TikTok will also lead to more…

There is also a Spotify playlist which includes all the “evidence.”

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To end this week, here’s a bop I re-discovered last night:

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Thanks for reading! See you next time for Week 10 (what the heck!?)