Murder, misinformation and frenzies: the dark side of TikTok

The TikTok Effect
★★★★
Stan*, August 6

As with other social media apps, video-sharing app TikTok has evolved since its launch in 2016. Initially, the platform focused on lighthearted lip-syncing and dancing videos, which just eight years on seems incredibly quaint.

Now the app has become, essentially, a business tool for companies and influencers, and it’s a very different beast. TikTok users see videos that aren’t necessarily from other people they follow or know, which has given rise to an incentivising culture that spurs creators to be more competitive with what they’re posting.

For this compelling – if not comprehensive – BBC documentary, Marianna Spring, the channel’s disinformation correspondent (what a job title), spent a year investigating some of the app’s harmful behaviour and the subsequent real-world consequences, in particular when TikTokkers involve themselves in real-world crime cases.

BBC disinformation reporter Marianna Spring (left) with true crime TikTokker Olivia.Credit: BBC

Internet sleuthing – when “citizen detectives” do their own research into crime – has been a largely anonymous venture until recently, and has, in a surprising number of cases, successfully solved crimes or identified suspects. But on TikTok, most of the sleuthing is motivated more by a desire for high engagement and likes than any sense of community or altruism. And a big news story – particularly a true crime – is guaranteed to get engagement.

Spring examines recent “TikTok frenzies”, where users have gone to extreme lengths for engagement, such as in the UK last year around the disappearance of Lancashire woman Nicola Bulley. The British mother disappeared while walking her dog in late January 2023, and while the story gripped the nation, police maintained early on that there was no evidence of suspicious circumstances or third-party involvement.

This didn’t deter TikTokkers from conducting their own investigations, though, and in less than two weeks, posts moved from speculation to wild conspiracy theories, including that Bulley’s friend was impersonating her, that her husband was a suspect and even that her disappearance was staged by the government. And then the content creators began to descend on her village, so many that the Lancashire police were granted extra dispersal powers to remove social media influencers from the scene.

Spring interviews TikTok user Heather, who, using doorbell footage as her “evidence”, posited that a friend had posed as Nicola Bulley, a theory that “rewarded” Heather with more than 3 million views – a “success” that prompted the app to congratulate Heather.

Spring meets others involved in similar frenzies, including a murder case in Idaho in the US, and she meets British anti-school influencer Adrian Markovac, who urges teenagers to rebel against school rules.

But it’s the insiders Spring talks to who are the most revealing. Former TikTok employees tell Spring that the app was never equipped for anything more than lip-syncing and dance routines, and that limiting online frenzies was seen to slow down its massive growth.

As one former employee who worked for the company in data strategy and analysis tells her anonymously, “in terms of dangerous content … I never heard of them trying to proactively prevent them from getting big. In general, they don’t want to – they don’t want to stand in the way of entertainment growing quickly on their platform.”

The company itself tells Spring that they have more than 40,000 “safety professionals” moderating content.

But Lara, a former content moderator in Australia, tells Spring that she saw “lots of dangerous trends” and that the platform has definitely impacted how people act, behave and treat others.

“I would not,” she tells Spring, “let my children use TikTok.”

*Nine is the owner of Stan and this masthead.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.