A young, anti-Trump TikToker is using conspiracy theories to amass millions of followers. 'This guy isn't Alex Jones,' says one expert. 'He's looking for a very different audience'
The concern is that these ideas could gain a real foothold among people who hadn’t heard of them before. Stansberry fears consistent exposure on a platform like TikTok will do the job other social media platforms have done before: making you think your curated information feed represents the whole world. “Once you’ve heard [something] six or seven times, you don’t know you’re part of a community where these videos are becoming more popular,” she says.
Ty joined TikTok in August 2019. His first post said his friends didn’t think he could get famous on the platform. “Prove them wrong,” read the text in the video, and he urged users to follow him. Since then, he’s slowly found his way to massive numbers. Early on, he mainly posted jokes about being in high school. There are videos about having acne, studying for tests, and ordering McNuggets at McDonald’s. A few went viral, but most have a few thousand views.
that accounts like Ty’s have little reason to change the direction they’re heading. “He’s financially incentivized to keep digging deeper and deeper, finding more conspiracies, so he can make more content,” Richards said. “Ty is just one example of a TikToker who has been rewarded for promoting conspiracy theories and incentivized to continue. His success isn’t exceptional, it’s a symptom of an economy that rewards clickbait content which attracts attention.