TikTok Has a Problem
When a person joins an online-dating app, and then starts texting some of the people they’ve met on that app, and then makes plans to hang out with some of those people in the hopes of making out, they have a reasonable, limited expectation of privacy.
Hardly anyone expects what happened to the mythological figure of “West Elm Caleb,” a bumbling villain of the New York dating scene and hapless victim of the internet. In January, after a couple of New York women with substantial TikTok followings discovered that they had been dating Caleb simultaneously, it quickly came out that he was guilty of other crimes—sending the same Spotify playlist to multiple people, for instance, and not returning text messages. One woman recalled how he had told her that he found it harder to go on dates in the winter, because of the cold. (She found this offensive.) Pretty soon brands were getting in on the West Elm Caleb conversation, as finding any excuse to talk about this pretty average dater in New York City became engagement-metric gold.
On TikTok, which is now the in the world, this phenomenon has become oddly—a guy who had been recorded sitting on a couch, looking sort of excited but not excited enough when surprised by a visit from his long-distance girlfriend. “During my tenure as Couch Guy,” Couch Guy later wrote in , “I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes.’” Next up was Sabrina Prater, a trans woman from outside of Flint, Michigan, who decided might be a “Buffalo Bill”–style serial killer based, similarly, on her “vibes.” On and on it goes: The platform generally known for dance trends and audio memes is also the site of serial “investigations,” in which users inflate the slightest signal into a source of outrage and obsession.
