Alright I will admit it, I got bored during the lockdown, downloaded the app and I actually enjoy it. 

But, I usually tend to stay away from horror related content on the app since it caters more to children and as you will see it is more clickbaity than genuine. But, even so, every night I kept getting some weird Livestreams on my “for you page”.

Right off the bat, there is definitely a pattern. Most of the livestreams are very similar and are in the dark, in some forest with an eerie voice speaking or just flat out grunting. And I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and watched for a while but there was pretty much nothing Happening, one of the livestreams was just of a guy riding his bike and claiming the police is after him when there was no sound or video of anyone other than himself on the streets. A lot of people seemed to surprisingly get scared though and I would assume it was young kids. 

Now one might say that I did not give it enough time or that there might actually be something sinister behind the scenes but that does not seem to be the case. I watched one stream when it was close to ending and the ending was this:   

Yep, it is the “Gottem” meme from years ago. As if it not plainfully obvious that they were just fishing for attention.

So is there something scary and sinister happening on Tiktok with these livestreams? Of course not. The algorithm is quick to pick up on anything controversial or dangerous happening and these streams would not survive more than a few hours let alone a few days. Upon further investigation it is obvious that they are trying to get followers which seems to be the main goal for anything these days and apparently it is working. They had a ton of viewers. Which in itself is not necessarily wrong but they put little to no effort in their content and there is nothing of substance offered.

But to be fair there are some streams that I came across that were better like this which I also don’t like anymore but paranormal hunting shows have always been there and at least they make an effort to create a narrative so I understand the appeal.

It is a shame that the focus and attention seems to be yet again on no effort maximum result style content that just wants your click instead of a constant viewer especially because it is totally possible to create content on TikTok that is actually great like this ARG. Sadly it rarely updates but it is very interesting.

Looking up TikTok ARGs did show me that there are more too so that is worth a post as well.

As far as the livestreams go though, it is just a bunch of teens trying to get a laugh and some followers from what I have seen. Nothing really of substance in it.