Matthew Heller, a user of TikTok, posted a video of a small traffic accident at a Florida intersection. In the video, a woman named Maddy Gilsoul is yelling at a man. He captioned the video, "I got hit from behind." My car was hit while I was stopped. The original video has been deleted from TikTok, but a different version is still up on his account.
Without TikTok, the incident would have remained a small but contentious traffic accident, the fault of which would have been determined by insurance companies. Thousands of users on the shortform video app argued about who was to blame. Was it Gilsoul who clipped the back of the car? Was it the fault of Heller? At one point in the news cycle, he was accused of faking it by TikTok users, after new footage surfaced from a nearby security camera that seemed to show him hitting Gilsoul first. Was the incident real? HornBlasters is a company that sells custom car horns. A car horn salesman is in the middle of a traffic accident. It all seemed perfect.
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As the numbers on Heller's video began to climb into the millions, TikTok's army of commentators rushed into the trending topic to debate and analyze what was happening. A TikToker named "The TikTok Attorney" asked his followers to watch the footage of the accident and decide who was responsible. A user from Toronto named Pushpeksidhu posted an update on the accident that was watched half a million times, sharing footage from Gilsoul's account that users hadn't seen yet, seemingly proving that Heller was at fault. A user who goes by the name of doctor.ryan made another video combining the new security camera footage with the account of Heller for a definitive look at the scandal.
Thanks to an obsession within the TikTok community with investigating, analyzing, and passing judgement on the content going viral on the platform, drama-reaction accounts like these are riding a huge wave of popularity. The app's young users are fascinated by the random videos, constructing elaborate conspiracy theories and even doxxing the people featured in them. Some sense of justice is what drives these campaigns to reveal other users.
The OSINT community is a teenage version.
In each of these instances, the app's aggressive recommendation algorithm awakens, pushing the controversies to millions of users, generating hundreds of videos, thousands of comments, and too many views to count. The app has become home to a teenage version of the open source intelligence community, made famous by outlets like the Atlantic Council.
The biggest account weighing in on the topic was the one run by a film director named Michael Mc. During the course of the content cycle, Mc posted several updates, at one point even connecting with Heller and sharing additional details about what happened.
If you are a member of TikTok, you have seen Mc's videos. Mc has a graying beard and low voice, which makes him stand out on an app that is defined by permanently teenage Hype House dancers. He specializes in what the right-wingers call "cancel culture" or what the mainstream journalists call "internet drama." He is part of a network of popular TikTok users who have risen to prominence thanks to the TikTok community.
Mc and his associates help to uncover racists, report anti-vax nurses to their respective hospitals, and help to cancel members of TikTok's rogues' gallery of conspiracy theorists. There is a fine line between citizen journalism and information warfare with a massive young audience.
Mc and Paterno were locked in a feud.
In the case of the Lamborghini saga, TikTok users drew lines and took the side of either Gilsoul or Heller, flooding their accounts with nasty comments. Gilsoul hasn't posted since October and the TikTok account is no longer active. This kind of work can get more intense.
He led a campaign against a FedEx delivery driver who claimed in a video that he would not deliver packages to any homes without an American flag or a Biden/Harris sign. Mc posted a picture of Paterno on his Facebook page and said he would send it to FedEx. Mc and Paterno were locked in a feud.
In one video, Mc says you are a piece of shit. Do you know how your wife and children do not agree with you? She begged you not to post this. She is getting threats, by the way, because you have posted a second time. Mc scolds his audience for sending threats to Paterno.
The whole episode ended with Paterno being fired from FedEx. Mc threatened to brand Paterno's back in a final update. Mc's audience can't get enough of it, so they flood his comment section with tips for more video investigations.
I look at the internet like a small town.
Mc is trying to bring accountability to how people behave on the internet. He isn't actively trying to get people fired, but he isn't quiet about it when it happens
Bad gas travels fast in a small town. He said that if you do something terrible in a small town, everyone knows about it. If I put something out there, my goal is not to get someone fired unless their job is directly harming people. So like a nurse not getting vaccinations. She might be infecting people. That is a thing. A police officer is harming people. That is the thing.
Mc said that he started making videos to debunk misinformation and conspiracy theories that came across his For You page, the central feed where TikTok users see content recommended to them. He said that as America began to roll out its vaccine, the app became filled with anti-vax content. A user sent him a video of a woman who bragged about selling fake vaccine cards on social media.
Users don't know how to deal with someone doing that sort of thing. They reach out to people like me and ask if they can see what this person is doing. Can you help with this?
The algorithm promotes tribalism.
Mc and the network of other TikTokers identified the woman as Jasmine Clifford, who was charged by law enforcement with conspiracy and possession of a forged instrument. According to Mc, his regular collaborators include the likes of ThatDaneshGuy,auntkaren0, andrx0rcist, all of whom have made headlines in the last few months for their flashy videos exposing and publicly shaming various villains within the progressive-leaning world of TikTok
Many long-time TikTok users feel that individual accounts have to step up and personally deal with the app's rampant misinformation, extremism, and conspiracy theories. If TikTok moderated its platform properly, his account wouldn't need to exist. He said that the algorithm promotes tribalism. You get inside of the bubble when you think that your perspective is the only thing that matters.
Something fundamentally changed about 10 years ago.
The videos these users post are a tightrope walk of investigative journalism, punditry, and open source intelligence that could easily fall into the same trap as the r/ FindTheBostonBomber experiment. We are past the point where journalistic institutions can decide who can and cannot conduct OSINT research, according to a resident senior fellow at the DFR Lab.
He told The Verge that he was not going to position himself as a legacy gatekeeper. You need to use communities and enthusiasm to accomplish good.
It is possible to perform this kind of work out in the open on an app like TikTok, which has a trending topic-focused algorithm that blurs together responsible TikTokers like Mc and more rogue accounts that are doing it for clout.
Bellingcat is structured in a way that their most famous, prominent analysts are doing their work on a Slack channel. They are not doing a lot of it on the social networking site.
Making things even more confusing is when large media organizations begin to weigh in on low-level TikTok dramas. Being the subject of a TikTok spat is one thing, but elevating it into a news story and turning it into international headlines is another.
I think I have to say in every video, "Hey, don't, don't threaten them"
Sophia Smith Galer, a senior news reporter for VICE who also runs a personal TikTok account with over 275,000 followers, said traditional media has a habit of turning the volume up on these minor naming-and-shaming campaigns happening on TikTok. Smith Galer told The Verge that the media often gives legitimacy to the justice carried out by random TikTok users.
She said that the rush to cover TikTok users investigating the disappearance of Gabby Petito or the reporting about furniture companies wrongly claiming that children were being sold during the US presidential election was what she saw. TikTok users have been overanalyzing videos on the app for a long time.
Mc shared Paterno's Facebook information and reported him to FedEx during his crusade against Paterno. The story got coverage in the New York Post after the media swarm started. Paterno is still on TikTok, where he is posting anti-vax content.
Smith Galer says that when the mainstream media covers these stories, the more responsible users like Mc, the bad actors, and the random shitposters get combined into a trend that makes the chaos on TikTok worse.
Smith Galer sees the current wave of amateur OSINT happening on TikTok as a net positive, but also a recipe for chaos. Roughly a quarter of the users on TikTok are between the ages of 10 and 19 according to Statista. A lot of children are learning how to doxx each other.
Smith Galer said that it was fun to see how OSINT skills are universal, but that it was not fun to see the lack of media literacy and the innocence in which content creators commit contempt of court, libel, or spread harmful misinformation.
Mc said he has been struggling with this dynamic recently. He said he was committed to exposing bad actors, but he has noticed that his followers aren't as interested in seeing his videos as he would like them to be.
I think I have to start saying in every video, 'Hey, don't, don't threaten them.' There were no death threats or violence. If you want to write to the employer and say you don't like what they did, that's your right. I don't believe that my followers did that when they called the cancer department and said, "I'll kill all of you." If anyone of my followers gets upset about something or someone who sees one of my videos, I will put it out there.
