🎵 Top Sounds 🎵
Our curated picks of the top sounds on TikTok
This is a soft background sound that’s perfect for Fall.
The format of this trend is simple. Respond to “Go to hell” with your personal version of hell.
Funky 🕺🏽
Another fun sound for video backgrounds, this is perfect for a funky vlog— or even to show how you’re multi-tasking.
Duvet 😊
This sound pairs well with slide show posts. The more absurd the better, naturally.
White 🤨
This song has been trending for the last few weeks, primarily as a way to call out racism.
This sound works wonderfully for impact content. We all know there are hypotheticals that can get in the way of beneficial policies. Never before has a sound been so prime to challenge means testing.
🔉 Our Sound Highlight 🔉
This Is Actually Disgusting
Mood: 😤
Paired with this clip, let us know what you need to (finally) speak up on.
🎥 Video Highlight 🎥
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I don’t care if the Barbie movie came out in July! This video from the Milwaukee Public Library is such a fun take on how to address book bans on TikTok.
👹 Effects Highlight 👹
It’s a cat chewing something crispy. It needs little explanation. Just use it with what you have always wondered about eating.
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This Mr. Rogers CapCut template can be used for sincere positive feedback or for praise that’s a little more ironic.
🗣️ The Moment 🗣️
Issues that are at the forefront of online discourse— the manosphere.
The manosphere needs to end. I am exhausted by alpha male podcasts, blue checks, and ‘fitness gurus’ who have more to say about fat women than they do about leg day.
I am sick of the insipidity of the manosphere. For the thousands of men who collect around harmful ideologies, you’d think someone would have managed to complete a single book other than the 12 Rules For Life and Rich Dad Poor Dad. I’m sick of the terms they eagerly throw around like first-graders who finally memorized their vocab list. Hypergamy. Sigma. High value.
I’m sick of entertaining their arguments. I’m sick of hearing young boys, who barely have context for the things they’re listening to, use phrases they’ve learned from the manosphere. I’m sick of platforms letting them continue to spew the same vitriol that is leading to the deaths of young girls like Elianne Andam and Brianna Ghey.
The manosphere serves a distinct political and social purpose, to radicalize young boys and men into the far right. Using a trusted combination of misogyny and racism, they lure young boys in. They tell boys that they’re better than girls. That their wants come before anything else. They give them the social values of a George R.R. Martin version of the 10th century, packaged as sage advice and wellness. They try to build ‘ideal’ men, men who can rest easy on their supposed physical and mental superiority.
What they create, of course, is hate.
It’s time for platforms to do something about the manosphere. There should be no place for this violent rhetoric.
☕ The Zeitgeist ☕
Hot topics from across the internet
Parisian bed bugs are coming for us. Not to be alarmist but AHHHH!
We’re finally addressing grandparents and how they hide money as they hand it to you.
Take, for example, my grandfather, the 87-year-old who sounds a lot like David Hockney, who becomes a member of the Peaky Blinders when handing over a twenty-pound note.
Rishi Sunak, I WILL fight you. The Conservative Party Conference was held in the UK. Rishi Sunak decided the thing the British people need most, in a time of rising food bank dependency, is more hatred for trans people. The Conservative government’s decision to opt for transphobic rhetoric is no surprise to anyone following the rise of transphobia in the UK but is no less repugnant.
A Love Is Blind participant is suing, claiming sexual assault and false imprisonment.
Apartheid Clyde says ‘stop the steal’ or rather, stop reporting tweets with political misinformation.
All while misinformation on Palestine and Israel is rampant on the app.
Mean Girls was uploaded to TikTok in a strange combination of copying pirates and finding a new way not to pay full residuals.
TikTok is launching an AI assistant for content ideation.
A Target Halloween decoration has become a sensation.
The best nepo baby in Hollywood is Francesca Scorsese based entirely on her TikTok.
🥡 The Takeaway 🥡
Capitalism.
I’m very tempted for “capitalism” to be my takeaway in every other edition of this newsletter. It cuts to the point. Why is a given trend happening in this industry? Capitalism, baby!
This week the economic motive is a little less buried than usual. TikTok Shop is annoying consumers. The stream of ads feels much more frequent on TikTok these days. If you fail to notice the shop icon in the corner of the screen you might even make the mistake of roping yourself into a two-minute QVC-worthy video about the wonders of the Shadow Work Journal.
It isn’t just TikTok Shop though. Gizmodo has dubbed this moment to be the start of a new era of social media, the Paid Age.
Meta and Twitter have both launched paid features. Meta is charging $17 for consumers to avoid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram while the worst people on Earth pay Elon to get frustrated with their view-to-like ratio. TikTok is reportedly working on charging $4.99 for users to hide ads.
I summarized Cory Doctorow’s blog on the enshittification of social media a little while back; the process of platforms dying. It goes a little something like this— a platform is good to users, then good to advertisers, then good to no one. Charging for an ad-free experience seems a little bad for everyone. Businesses get fewer eyeballs, while users deal with declining quality due to being overserved ads or through having a once-free service gain a price.
These changes, and the rising tide of paid web, are something to worry about. The internet should be a freer place. A place of access and information. This isn’t just about lessened enjoyment of scrolling TikTok. Or even about about businesses and consumers. Paid social media poses a genuine threat to the openness of the internet.