TikTok Politics and the Era of Embodied Memes

Allow me, for a moment, to talk about NyQuil Chicken. In September the FDA issued a warning against viral TikTok social-media challenges involving medicines—specifically, a trend of boiling chicken in NyQuil as a sleep aid. The FDA cautioned that cooking chicken in NyQuil is “unsafe.” This warning prompted a lot of people in the media to assume that teens on TikTok were poisoning themselves in droves for internet clout.

Of course, they weren’t. TikTok told BuzzFeed News that there never was a NyQuil Chicken trend on the platform; the “sleepytime chicken” recipe originated long ago as an inside joke/shitpost on 4chan, and some screenshots went viral earlier this year on Reddit. But the FDA’s warning triggered a slew of breathless, incorrect news articles about TikTok and NyQuil Chicken, which—you guessed it—spurred a whole lot of TikTok searches for NyQuil Chicken. (If you want to read more about this, Ryan Broderick has a great explainer.)

News outlets and government organizations love a good social-media moral panic. But the big reason why something like NyQuil Chicken gets so much pickup is a general lack of understanding about what is actually happening on TikTok. The platform is, by social-media standards, newish. And because its user base is reasonably young, you have a lot of people writing or commenting about the platform who don’t really use it, let alone understand the customs, trends, and subcultures that bubble out of it.

Also: TikTok functions differently than other social networks in that its algorithmic recommendation engine and “For You” page supplant the traditional follower model. That big distinction, paired with the fact that the inner workings of TikTok’s (very good) algorithm are an especially black box, leads a lot of people to (wrongly) ascribe almost magical powers to the algorithm (like the notion that it is pied-pipering kids to make poisonous poultry).

There’s not tons of great qualitative research about what exactly is going on across the platform or how TikTok’s unique architecture influences the behavior of its users. Which is why I got pretty excited last week when Kevin Munger, Benjamin Guinaudeau, and Fabio Votta released a new paper looking at Munger, a political science professor at Penn State, told me he wanted to look at the factors “that determine who makes (and how they make) the content that flows throughout the platform”