“Hate brings views”: Confessions of a London fake news TikToker

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-creator-hate-immigrants

Posted by plain_handle

8 Comments

  1. Are people’ lives really so empty that they cannot exist without drama and hate?

    I recently read that there are conspiracy theories floating around about Epstein being a cannibal based on nothing. Isn’t him being a paedophile and running a sexual exploitation ring for minors enough anymore?

  2. Electricbell20 on

    It’s disappointing that an article saying hate brings views seems to be lacking the figures to back it up. Videos getting 10k views…is that it.

    There’s a small local tiktok account for where I am. They have 5k views for talking about going to a hotel for breakfast. It went up 5 hours ago.

  3. Stories about London being successful (diverse, safe, wealthy, etc, which it is) isn’t going to drive clicks 

  4. Nothing new. Anything hateful, controversial, call it whatever you want, will bring views because you’ll have people rushing to defend it and people saying “I knew it”. That’s how it’s always been and probably always will be. People love drama

  5. It’s pretty rife. You have a quick look on Twitter and there will be someone with a blue checkmark posting nonsense as they know people will respond to it and it pushes it up the algorithm to get more eyes on it and so forth.

  6. Unfortunately true, and not just on TikTok.

    A controversial musician (not gonna name him) appeared on my YouTube feed three weeks ago. This guy was previously banned from the platform and had obviously created another account to evade the YT ban. He otherwise has a small following on X, Rumble and SubscribeStar (a Patreon alternative that right-wingers who get banned from there often flock to.)

    His channel was previously pulling in just a few hundred views per video. And then the algorithm decided to promote one of the vintage 19th century song cover he did which got clicks because the title, thumbnail and lyrics contained the n-word (with a hard-R.) That video got 860k views and now his videos are easily pulling in 5 to 6 digit viewcounts.

    The fact that YouTube promoted this kinda tells me that something is fundamentally fucking broken with their content moderation.