Our content is too spicy for TikTok

For the last month, I’ve been experimenting with short-form video. I teamed up with Dan Méth, an incredible artist and editor (who made the poster above!), and we’ve been grinding it out on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. You can follow if you like 😉

Making video content is not my favorite thing in the world, though. Aside from the mortifying experience of having to look at my own hideous visage, I also just find videos supremely frustrating to make. Unlike newsletters, there really isn’t a way to directly connect with an audience on video platforms. It’s deeply alienating. You have to jump through a bunch of algorithmic hoops to reach people before they can even see your videos — make your thumbnail this way, open the clip a certain way, cover these kinds of topics. The most exciting thing about starting Garbage Day nearly six years ago was that I didn’t have to do any of that! And I think this newsletter, with all its idiosyncrasies, is better for it. Newsletters, also, crucially, don’t have censors.

Last week, another one of our videos was flagged on TikTok. This is at least the third one to get thrown in TikTok jail. Which is very annoying because TikTok is where we’ve seen the most exciting growth, so far. When a video receives a flag it means we have to appeal and try and get a human to watch it. When it’s finally released from the queue, no one ever sees it. My theory is TikTok penalizes videos that don’t perform well immediately after upload and a flag means up to 12 hours of no activity on that video while it moves through the system. The last video of ours to get flagged was about Kirkslop on TikTok. Go figure. Our most recent video to get a flag, however, did not win its appeal and we’ve, apparently, received our “first warning,” which you get before getting an official “strike,” at which point TikTok can just delete your account if you misbehave again.

You can, luckily, still watch our video that is Officially Too Hot For TikTok. We upload all of our content to every platform. Here’s a version on Instagram. The video was a riff on a story from Wednesday’s Garbage Day: A whole lot of people on social media believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was killed and secretly replaced with an AI. This story is everywhere. Our video covers the discourse, knocks down the rumor, and then ends with a joke about how baby boomers like Netanyahu wear too much makeup and look weird on camera. Seemed harmless enough! And it was — for Instagram and YouTube. Just not TikTok.

For the last few months, Garbage Day researcher Adam and I have been tracking the changes to TikTok after it was carved off from ByteDance by Trump-connected business leaders. We initially believed that TikTok wasn’t so much censoring anti-Trump and anti-Israel content as much as it was burying that content in evergreen viral junk. Something we’ve seen Facebook do many times over the years, replacing news organizations in the News Feed with random bloggers whenever US politics gets too spicy. Our data point for this theory was that in the weeks immediately after TikTok US launched, a single account — a guy making videos with his “fat dog” — made one of the most popular videos, two months in a row. Something that has never happened in all of the years we’ve been tracking the top videos on TikTok. That seems like stagnation to us. But the fact our banned video was about Israel — and ends with a line calling US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee “fried dogshit” and a joke about how Netanyahu wears too much makeup — is hard to ignore in this context.

We’ve known for years that TikTok is far more censorious than its competitors, algospeak being the most visible impact of its influence. And, yeah, I refuse to use algospeak because I respect my audience and, also, I’m 36. But that’s not what TikTok is saying the problem is here. Their “violation reason” has actually changed a few times over the weekend. First, they said our video was blocked because of misinformation. So I assumed maybe they wanted us to be more explicit about Netanyahu NOT being AI. But now, as of this morning, it’s saying it’s because it includes “synthetic or manipulated media.” lol does TikTok know something about Netanyahu that we don’t?

We’re going to keep posting videos on social platforms because if you ignore these short-form platforms you increasingly don’t exist. But this little episode has been a stark reminder of how distorted the information is that we’re all seeing on short-form video platforms. There are thumbs on the scale everywhere there conversations happening online now. And it will only get harder to have conversations elsewhere.

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Polymarket’s newest popup, fresh off their reportedly “bleak” New York City grocery giveaway, was a “Monitoring The Situation” bar in Washington, DC. Earlier this month, I wrote about the monitoring the situation meme, which has become all the rage with X-addled finance guys. They’ve been itching for a sports bar that shows vibe-coded dashboards tracking geopolitics and various markets so they can, uh, make friends, I guess?

Well, Polymarket tried to do just that. It was a mess. WIRED’s Makena Kelly went to the situation bar’s opening night and reported that they made everyone wait outside in the rain for over an hour and when everyone finally got inside none of the TVs worked. The only thing that was working was a big blue ball that said “Polymarket.” They seemed to finally figure out how to get the TVs on by the second night. But the stuff they’re showing on the screens sucked, apparently.

While we’re talking about Polymarket, The New York Times recently reported that the company’s X feed, which is currently LARPing as a breaking news account, is full of false and misleading posts.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how competing prediction market Kalshi is responding to Polymarket’s newest stunt, they ended their first quarter board meeting filming themselves doing pushups. Very cool.

We’ve known for a long time that most of what President Donald Trump does is vibes-based and most of those vibes are lifted directly off of whatever he’s watching on Fox News throughout the day. And it seems like the idea of sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports this week was yet another example of this.

As CNN reported this morning, right-wing pundit Clay Travis went on Fox News on Saturday morning and said that one of his viewers had called in and suggested sending ICE agents in to deal with the massive security lines spiraling out into the parking lots of major airports right now, thanks to the government shutdown. A few hours later, Trump took to Truth Social to suggest the very same idea, writing, “If the Democrats do not allow for Just and Proper Security at our Airports, and elsewhere throughout our Country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before!”

A few hours after that, Trump confirmed on Truth Social that ICE agents would be deployed to airports, writing, “The Democrats are grossly incompetent! ICE is ready to go on Monday.”

There are a whole lot of leftists and liberals who should know better excitedly sharing clips from Tucker Carlson’s podcast. He’s been extremely critical of the the war in Iran and the US relationship with Israel. And, yes, it is somewhat satisfying to see him put his journalist hat back on and ask people like Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes basic questions and watch them glitch out. He did a similar interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee last month. But you can’t lose sight of what the larger project is with interviews.

Right-wingers — and the even further right, like Nick Fuentes — know that the Trump coalition is falling apart and they have correctly diagnosed that the second Trump administration’s disastrous foreign policy is largely the reason why. But if you can’t quite envision how this works, a TikTok account called @liberalgr0yper recently had a big viral hit on the platform with a Joe Biden fancam set to a voiceover from… Nick Fuentes.

Look, I’m not trying to let my current beef with TikTok bleed into our coverage lol, but I am annoyed. I’m especially annoyed because there are two “series” doing very well on the platform right now that are entirely AI-generated and extremely dumb. They’re called Fruit Love Island and Candy Love Island and they are pulling in a staggering amount of views right now. Here’s a sampling. This video has been watched 35 million times.

I’m hesitant to say these “shows” have actual “fans” and I’m doubly hesitant to trust the metrics here. Though, based on the comments, a huge chunk of the people watching are doing so ironically it seems. Pretty sure that’s the case with this X account that’s pretending to be a stan of Fruit Love Island.

It is probably not a good sign for both TikTok and AI that it impossible to tell if people actually like this stuff or are engaging with it just because it’s stupid!

P.S. here’s a predynastic Egyptian terracotta bowl with human feet.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***