Is It A Crime To Yell Girlboss Alert On A Twitter Timeline Of Coldhealing Followers?

on the ethics of reposting tiktoks

First of all let me get this straight: this is my diary or my autofiction, not a TikTok meme page. I know what it says on the cover. But I've been reposting TikToks to Twitter for a long time, since 2018 on the first day I downloaded that app, and it's gotten to the point that it's blended with the diary and become something else. 

In 2018 when I joined TikTok it was transitioning from lipsyncing fringe culture to normie culture center. On early TikTok you could find people deployed on military bases singing to nightcore versions of Zombie by the Cranberries, or gamer girls completely sincerely singing to Overwatch parody songs. At the same moment as these fringe cultures there was an edgy teen invasion of TikTok, mocking these people and doing humor where they'd shoot nerf guns revealing messages about ethots making them a sandwich. This was still a fringe group but it sterilized the app of the "cringe"  that ruled it before. I found both groups interesting as people, the way one was operating on a different irony level than the other but I was still seeing into both of their rooms snippets of how they lived life. 

Now, five years later, we have the TikTok that's the center of American internet culture. For its centrality I've continued to be interested in it, but also the way it so openly encourages people to be themselves. On no other app can you find people so open and honest in short digestible videos. On TikTok, fringe cultures and central culture can seamlessly live beside each other, by the nature of the central For You page. The algorithm ruthlessly selects the perfect videos that humans will pay attention to. Sometimes the fringe produces something interesting that goes over well with a lot of people, the fringeness still being present but now strangely evocative of something larger, and those are the videos that I often repost to my Twitter page. 

TikTok didn't really become a defining feature to my Twitter presence until the past year. I don't think I post TikToks in substantially higher volume than I used to, but I'm more consistent in it, and the Twitter algorithm loves consistency because people love consistency in what they consume. Despite my increased consistency, I don't fully understand why someone would subject themselves to four coldhealing diary posts and low effort jokes to get one coldhealing TikTok post, but I'm sure there's some of the 30,000 people who clicked the follow button who are like that. I guess I know there's people like that, because people have told me so. It's cool that people think my curations are valuable or a safe replacement for blasting their brain with direct TikTok exposure. That wasn't the mission when I set out but it's cool. 

I love you for caring about me in whatever way you do, but I don't think I really do anything special in my "anthropology".  Mostly I scroll my For You Page, and occasionally I dive into an account that interests me more. I do follow certain accounts over long periods of time but I rarely repost those individuals, because I don't want to make individuals into characters in my account’s universe. Firstly that would be mean, and secondly I try to talk about something larger than individuals if I’m not talking about myself. I do try really hard to keep my For You page algorithm tuned to content that I like, and I do put some effort into making my screenshots frame-perfect so that they look nice on the Twitter timeline. But beyond that I don’t think anything distinguishes me from anyone else with the TikTok app who reposts a screenshot to Twitter, besides the expectations of my audience. 

I want to be clear that reposting content always means something, even when uncaptioned. It's impossible for your voice not to come through, from the context in which you repost, the subjects you show interest in. I don't think my TikToks are truly neutral observation from a detached viewer in a lonely tower outside of reality. The things I post mean something by virtue of me choosing to repost them. But I often don't know what my opinion is when I repost, just that the video interests me. And leaving my reposts often uncaptioned is fun because I like the way that different people respond, seeing a second round of anthropology in my replies as people try to make sense of something that interested me.

I do try to be kind to the people I repost, especially in comparison to WomenPostingTheirLs style content aggregation accounts that purely mock. I don’t think I’m that, but that's a low bar to clear. Some of my followers are nice about the people I repost, some of my followers are mean. As a radical centrist Libra, I don't condemn those who disagree with my ethics. But I'm left with the question of personal responsibility. 

One sort of TikTok that I have notoriety for reposting is “Day In My Life As A Tech Worker” videos. A lot of these TikTok posts are by women because women are prettier and do better into the algorithm and also women like to share the details of their days. These posts do really well because they're just a slightly twisted form of reality; we all go to work, but it usually doesn't look quite so much like leisure. It's fiction but so are many jobs. In my comments I sometimes get unfiltered misogyny, class ressentiment, racism, general cruelty. Misogyny is the most common one because my algorithm skews that way and I will most likely have to pay for my crimes against the female gender with a few decades in purgatory. Often my reposts get back to the original poster and the comments make them sad. 

I'll occasionally get a DM from someone asking me to delete my repost. I occasionally will see a response video on TikTok about the harassment in the comments they received when I reposted them. I also more rarely get a Twitter reply from someone excited to see their content hit a wider audience, who’s happy that I reposted them. All of the occasions get more and more frequent as more people follow my account. The first two make me feel guilty, make me wonder if I'm not taking enough responsibility for my choices in what I repost. 

In some sense internet culture is built on reposting, on defining your identity in contrast or in synthesis with others. Twitter's quotetweet feature is entirely about that.  TikTok's duet feature is entirely about that. That's not to abdicate responsibility for my own choices, but it's true. I've been anthropologized myself; one example was my "stem student could pubstomp a humanities course" tweet, which got 5000+ quotetweets, people flaming my DMs and replies, reposting me to other platforms saying I was a dumb stemlord who didn't understand the value of art. It helped that I was being intentionally abrasive in that post which left the people who took it at face value obviously wrong about me as a human. But the reposters are always wrong, I'm often wrong when I repost, it's impossible to understand the depth of the real human behind the original post when you're saying something about a small caricature of them that they more than likely posted to be silly. You say a lot of wrong things about the person you're reposting, but in some ways it's more about you defining yourself in juxtaposition to the small thing they said than it is about being an accurate interpretation of them. I felt fine when this happened to me, but I’m also twenty-five years old and I’ve lived a lot of my life on the internet so I know why it’s like that.

I still sometimes feel guilt about the reposts even though I don’t think I’m uniquely evil about it. I don't know if everyone in the world should have to have the strength I call for above for the sake of my reposting fun, to be themselves in spite of random people on the internet defining them as a twisted caricature they make to their real image. It's not an easy thing to do. Living on the internet today is full of things that aren't easy to do, but should I personally be making it any harder? 

I do think my reposting has value, for making more visible the world as it speaks about itself. There's an unflinching honesty on TikTok, honesty taken beyond truth. I find what they say and how they say it very endearing and important to share. Twitter is the medium for me, I don’t have a corporeal enough form to be successful on TikTok, but I find TikTok really interesting and important. When I started on Twitter it was a cultural center, but the center has shifted to the new platform, at least for the youth. I want to talk about what’s happening on TikTok, I want to show it to people, I think it matters.

I don't have a consistent moral message in my TikTok reposts.  I’m interested in the details and the contradictions, which makes it harder for people to always know how to react. I encourage the readers to try to take it generously and kindly, but it’s okay if you don’t, it’s okay if you're mad. I want my followers to be honest. Simultaneous honesty and kindness is so hard, but it’s so powerful. I don't know how to do the math to weigh the ethical value of sharing what’s happening on TikTok compared to the ethical negatives of making the original posters feel bad, since they're completely different ethical vectors. But I try to maximize the value of the first while minimizing the damage of the second. There are TikToks I can't post anymore because the downsides are too obvious with the audience I have, things in their post that are too identifying, too sensitive of subject matters, or posted by accounts too small that my platform will meaningfully warp their engagement. That’s sad but there’s no catastrophic loss. I can say what I need to say in another way. 

As I said earlier, reposting is all about the context. This piece is to give more context. I don't have a triumphant conclusion to the titular question, besides that it’s complicated and I try to be responsible for what I share. Thank you for coming along on the coldhealing journey.