Everything I Said About Going Viral Was Wrong

On TikTok, the Employees Decide Who Goes Viral

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Philip Mandelbaum
01/25/2023

Three white female millennials performing for TikTok in front of a ring light and mobile phone

OK, what I’ve said about going viral may not be all wrong. But when it comes to TikTok, this geriatric millennial was a little naive. “TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in ‘heating,’ a manual push that ensures specific videos ‘achieve a certain number of video views,’ according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes.”

Call me crazy, but this doesn’t read like a few apples that fell too far from the tree; TikTok management is telling employees to manipulate performance — on a social media platform already rife with racism, antisemitism, “casual” classism and every other ism that mirrors and perpetuates historical inequities. What could go wrong?

And this isn’t new. Since day one, TikTok’s been pretending that its algorithm alone determines what appears on your “for you” page. In reality, unlike competitors Meta and Google, which have clearly labeled their partnerships with, for instance, “public health and elections groups to distribute accurate information about COVID-19 and help users find their polling place,” TikTok has never publicly disclosed its use of “heating,” or intentionally amplifying certain posts or users.

In fact, “sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count,” which “has potentially benefited some influencers and brands… at the expense of others.” Plus, since the platform doesn’t bother to label ads, sponsored posts or artificially viral content, nobody can tell the difference. And even that’s not all: Forbes found that numerous TikTok employees have also abused their heating privileges, boosting posts by their own or friends’ accounts.

For most digital businesses and online advertisers — in this day and age — such a flagrant lack of transparency or abuse of trust would spell doom. For the fastest-growing social media brand on earth, a damning Forbes report is but a blip. For the rest of us, it’s frustrating at best, terrifying at worst.

A thin Black millennial male with teal blue sunglasses and a white hood, reading Forbes Magazine, in front of a regal building

As an ethicist and longtime content marketer, I’m just pissed. Every time a hard-working journalist exposes a social media company or any other brand for fraudulent, hypocritical, biased or even misleading practices or policies, consumers suffer — and become even more suspicious and reticent of all brands, including yours and mine.

“We think of social media as being very democratizing and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an audience,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In many ways, however, we’ve all been duped. “[T]he same old power structures are replicating in social media… where the platform can decide winners and losers.”

That’s why, I suspect, Wajeeh Lion, the first openly gay Saudi and a political asylee in the US, has experienced the downside of app’s like TikTok picking and choosing who gets to win.

“I used to have 300 to 400 people on my livestream, and now I barely get one or two. My posts get taken down, and then reappear, and my account has been suspended at least twice” he told me. “There is extreme censorship on the app, especially toward the Arabic LGBTQ community and religious minorities. And there is no communication at all between TikTok and content creators like myself.” Lion told me he’s tried to reach out to TikTok multiple times, to no avail.

For US politicians on both sides of the aisle, TikTok curating what’s supposed to be organic is more than a little concerning — and at least a little reminiscent of charges levied against Meta/Facebook (1, 2) and Twitter. Only worse.

Chinese flag blowing in the wind

Since TikTok is owned by a Chinese corporation, ByteDance — which has already admitted to manipulating timelines for Chinese users, as well as surveilling the physical location of American journalists — the response from American legislators was severe, even before the new Forbes report was released.

A bi-partisan bill to ban TikTok in the US was introduced in Congress in December 2022. If it passes, problem solved (I guess, though it introduces another dilemma: whether this would/should be considered censorship or another form of government overreach); if it doesn’t pass, TikTok needs to change before an avalanche of advertisers and consumer and brand accounts take off for BeReal or the next app where influencers, popularity and performance aren’t even part of the conversation.

It seems Neil Schaffer, ‘fractional’ CMO, social media marketing expert and author of The Age of Influence, agrees. “It’s not [even] surprising that this happened,” he said. It’s disconcerting “to the extent that it might be happening and who is deciding under what guidelines to boost whose content,” but “this has already been happening behind the scenes at every social network, so it is an industry-wide issue.”

Oof. Guess we all have to take yet another look at our social media marketing strategy.