Trendspotting: identifying fetish content and a global network of low-stakes spies
Woman takes one for the team, makes identifying fetish content on TikTok her job
TikTok user Lena Rae, who, in her own words, joined TikTok to “shitpost and bully cops” (mood), has carved out an entirely different niche instead: identifying fetish content.
Rae’s account has quickly taken off thanks to her duets with bizarre videos in which she walks viewers through what’s going on and explains how likely it is to be fetish content or not.
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It is, quite honestly, a public service, but it’s also taught me way more than I wanted to know about the sheer number of unusual fetishes out there and how many odd, but ultimately seemingly innocuous, videos online actually exist because someone’s getting their rocks off to them.
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Going forward, I’m just going to assume everything is fetish content for someone until proven otherwise. Nothing is safe.
Gossip Girl’s network of spies 2.0
Another interesting genre of TikTok I’ve spotted lately is people posting messages intended for one person in the hopes the algorithm will get it in front of them. In these videos, the person’s friends/loved ones/enemies are talking about them loudly, rudely, and in public, and the TikToker thinks they deserve to know.
One such video was aimed at a Sydney resident named Jason, whose cyclist friends were overheard talking about how much better their morning ride was without him. TikToker Erica Mallett wasn’t having that, and posted a video letting him know.
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A more common subgenre of this type of TikTok is girls letting other girls know that their boyfriends are cheating on them, not with a “I’m coming to you as a woman” DM, since they don’t know the girlfriend and have no means of contacting her, but with an incredibly specific TikTok.
This video, from back in June when everybody and their mother was in Europe, is one of the most popular examples I’ve seen, netting over 2 million views and 433k likes. The TikTok user says in the video, "If you're British and your name is Sam and you're dating a British guy with long, black curly hair and he's in Italy with two of his friends, he was just talking about how he's cheating on you and his friend is also cheating on his girlfriend."
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Being old, these videos remind me of Gossip Girl’s network of sources across New York City who would send in tips and gossip about the main characters, which meant that practically nowhere in the city was safe from the prying eyes of the public for Blair, Serena and co. A more modern example of this would be people sending in tips to Deuxmoi, particularly tips about Nicholas Braun, who cannot take ten steps in New York without someone alerting the popular Instagram account.
These videos are driven by a more nobler motive, however; wanting to let someone know that people they think they can trust are loudly and openly talking shit about them, or worse, cheating on them. Much has been said about expectations around privacy in public and people being shared to social media without their knowledge, so this could potentially raise the question of whether or not strangers sharing private details of not-so-private conversations carries with it similar ethical concerns. In this age of surveillance and social media, however, it’s probably best to err on the safe side and not talk loudly in public about how much you’re cheating on your girlfriend. Even on the other side of the world, there are eyes and ears everywhere…