The Dangerous Side of TikTok Fame and Social Media Algorithms: A Look at the Valencia High School Incident
How Algorithmic Incentives Encourage Negative Behavior in Youth and Undermine Social Justice Efforts
After the Valencia High School girls sang what can only be described as the dumbest troll song ever created by an "artist" named London Yellow, everyone seemed to have gotten their pound of flesh. The girls did this in pursuit of TikTok fame, where the algorithm has encouraged our youth to be atrocious in hopes of gaining views and likes. Unfortunately, this algorithm is a significant threat to our nation and youth.
If you didn't watch last month's Hart board meeting regarding this situation, you missed some pretty absurd moments and some level-headed responses from community members. Before delving into the outrageous behavior, let's highlight some of the more composed speakers who attempted to reason with a heated audience.
One such speaker was Dr. Aakah Ahuja, who ran for the Santa Clarita City Council in 2020 and 2022. He approached the podium with a giant American flag and spoke from a place of compassion and understanding, acknowledging that these were just kids who made a mistake. But unfortunately, Dr. Ahaja was also one of the few people in our community before this event who sounded the alarm about the real threat of TikTok and social media on our youth, writing three times this year, even calling TikTok the epidemic that it is! So the good doctor tried to warn our community that this was a problem, and many didn't listen.
A few speakers questioned why people were mad at the girls rather than angry that the song existed. London Yellow is famous because he figured out that extreme and shocking behavior jolts social media algorithms into huge numbers, which means potential fame and money. London Yellow has never released an album through a major record label because today that isn't required. The song in question is widely available, with a stream count of over 15 million on YouTube and Spotify. It's also available on Apple Music, but the stream count isn't visible.
Why didn't Valerie Bradford call out these companies for benefiting and helping spread this song far and wide? Nihilist leftists sure didn't have a problem calling out Spotify when the guy with patents in the mRNA tech being forced into the arms of everyone in the country called what was happening mass formation psychosis. Of course, that can't happen, but a song disparaging the people you claim to represent is fine?
Dylan Mulvaney is a prime example of a nobody feeling out the algorithms to become famous. Dylan's first TikTok was about a week before Covid-19 house arrests as you scroll up the feed, you see that most view counts when he was a sort of a gay Steve Irwin type were in the 500k range with the occasional spike into the 1 to 1.5 million views. By the end of 2020, Dylan had a gender reveal party where they came out as non-binary. This saw little to no change in the number of views for Mulvaney's numbers. Then in 2022, Dylan released this TikTok, which saw a significant spike in views that only increased moving forward. Mulvaney went from being a micro-influencer to a mega-influencer overnight.
Most people know about YouTube paying their creators, but many don't know both Instagram (Meta) and TikTok also pay select creators. TikTok generally pays between $20 to $40 for 1 million views; this is nothing compared to the money that can be made through sponsored posts, which is where the real money is made. For example, Mulvaney makes an estimated 50 to 80 thousand dollars per post.
With that kind of potential money in play, Why go to college or trade school? Why work hard at learning skills? When you can just act like a jackass on TikTok and potentially make more money than your parents in a year with a few posts? The situation is compounded by the increasing virality of social media, which fosters a culture of one-upmanship and incentivizes increasingly negative behavior. In short, what is cutting-edge one day differs from the next.
Why did this video of the girl get 2 million views? It wasn't clever or intelligent; in fact, it was because it was the opposite; the algorithm juiced up at the adverse reaction to a bunch of pretty white girls singing an idiotic song, a song that wouldn't exist if not for the algorithms themselves. Negative attention is still attention. The video doesn't get 2 million views if these girls were black, like the artist that made the song, because that isn't edgy enough to jolt the algorithm. Just like a lab rat that figures out pressing a button gets it a treat, algorithms train young minds that acting like an idiot might result in money and fame might coming out of their phones.
At the meeting, an incident that stood out was the intense altercation between Nancy Fairbanks and Valerie Bradford and the young individuals accompanying her. Fairbanks criticized Bradford, who is in charge of the NAACP chapter in Santa Clarita, for not taking any action when Fairbanks expressed her dissatisfaction with Bradford's remark stating that "We will not remain silent and tolerate either obvious or implicit racism in this city" and that "your silence equals complicity." Bradford had been complicit when a Hart Board member used an Asian slur in a Facebook post.
It is hard to miss the growing disregard for Asians in social justice conversations. For example, community activist and lone protestor in the "free speech" zone, Steve Petzold, noted in the comments on the Signal article, "It was notable to me Angela Davis never referred to Asians / Pacific Islanders as a minority group in need of social justice."
Why are Angela Davis and Valerie Bradford complicit in the increasing hate crimes against the Asian community? Is it because the Asians / Pacific Islanders demographic breaks most of the narrative structural & systemic racism put forth by race hustlers like themselves? Instead, they are trying to undermine Asians / Pacific Islanders' hard work to force the exact result for everyone.
Below is a video for people who desire an opposing view to Angela Davis; this is Thomas Sowell, a former Marxist who has spent his life dispelling everything Angela Davis pushed on Saturday.
I'm astonished that sufficient demand exists for this weirdness to make anyone up to $80k for one post. Just to act like a hopeless idiot. This monkey has some disturbing priorities. I berate my fellow Gen X pals for following TikTok ass-wagglers and buying them Escalades when they could spank it to Pornhub like normal middle-aged shut-ins. Starve the Instagram beast!