AoIR2022-submission-template.docx


Selected Papers of #AoIR2022:
The 23rd Annual Conference of the

Association of Internet Researchers
Dublin, Ireland / 2-5 Nov 2022

THE VIBES ARE OFF: TRACING VIRAL TARGETED THEORIES ACROSS TIKTOK

Yvonne M. Eadon
Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP)
University of North Carolina, Chapel HIll

Introduction
The social media and short video streaming app TikTok has grown exponentially in the
past four years: from 55 million global users in 2018, to 689 million in 2020, to one
billion in 2021—a 45% increase from 2020 to 2021 (Wang 2021). The app’s growth, and
its marked influence on other apps (Aten 2020) show that studying the
socio-techno-cultural dynamics of TikTok are essential for understanding the wider
forces at work in our contemporary digital landscape.

TikTok’s uniqueness and appeal derives from its mimetic affordances: the material and
sociocultural determinants of how users can engage with the platform, including specific
tools and algorithms (Bucher and Helmond 2018) are built on logics of imitation and
replication (Zulli and Zulli 2020). Content is often created by using a sound from another
creator’s video, “stitching” with a video in order to respond to it, or using the green
screen effect, in which a creator can place someone else’s video in the background of
their own. TikTok’s main content feed, the “For You Page” (FYP) is precisely
algorithmically personalized for each user. The FYP algorithm is notoriously good at
cultivating virality (Le Compte and Klug 2021) in particular a sped-up kind of
hyper-virality that spikes over a matter of days, sometimes hours.

Case Study: Stella Weber
One such hyper-viral incident took place in late 2021: a recently out transgender woman
and TikTok creator, Stella Weber, went viral on the platform. Some of her videos,1

consisting of her dancing in her home in a variety of outfits, garnered views in the
millions. These numbers were a result of other creators making videos about her,
accusing her of being a serial killer or kidnapper. One creator specializing in “creepy”

1 Stella Weber is a pseudonym. Although the incident and her TikTok profile are public, the creator’s
privacy remains important.

Suggested Citation (APA): Eadon, Y. (2022, November). The Vibes are Off: Tracing Viral Targeted
Theories Across TikTok. Paper presented at AoIR 2022: The 23rd Annual Conference of the Association
of Internet Researchers. Dublin, Ireland: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.



content used the green screen effect to zoom in on a computer monitor in the
background of one of Stella’s videos, positing that the blurry images on the screen
looked like security footage of two women being confined. Comments upon comments
on this and similar videos suggested that Stella’s content had “Buffalo Bill vibes,”
referencing the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs whose character design is
notoriously transphobic (Romano 2021). Beyond the “creepy vibes” of Stella’s videos
(likely a classist reaction to her living situation) the main evidence given for her
supposedly being a kidnapper are these blurry computer monitor images. It is often
easy to fill in the blanks when something comes from a source the reader or viewer
finds untrustworthy: some JFK assassination researchers speculate that the redactions
on declassified documents contain the keys to the entire case (Eadon 2019). In this
circumstance, we see people filling in the blanks in a different way: shaped by their own
unquestioned normative perceptions of the monstrosity and concomitant
untrustworthiness of transness and poverty.

In a matter of days, a variety of discourses emerged from this initial viral theorization,
from people showing up unannounced at Stella’s home to interview her on camera, to
creators who had accused her of being a serial killer apologizing to her publicly, to
videos by queer creators pointing out the transphobia inherent in comments referencing
Buffalo Bill. One such creator asked: “If you were one of the countless people that was
saying this account was giving you Buffalo Bill vibes, I really want you to think about
why.” Videos like this one are critical of the original, normative narrative framing of
Stella’s content, illustrating the depth and variety of discourses that can circulate around
such viral incidents.

Targeted Theories
Through a discourse analysis of this and two other case studies (outlined below), this
exploratory research project outlines and defines a new kind of phenomenon taking
place on TikTok: that of the viral targeted theory: an amateur investigation of an
individual creator based on an—often mundane—activity recorded in a TikTok video.
Targeted theories are related to online harassment; in many cases they constitute a
type of harassment. They are also related to conspiracy theories, but are distinct from
them in that targeted theories accuse an individual, rather than a group, of duplicity.

Research questions for this project include: What are targeted theories, and are they
unique to TikTok? How do TikTok’s platform affordances create an environment that is
(or is not) especially hospitable for targeted theorizing and concomitant discourses?
How are the identities of targeted creators who are marginalized exploited and even
weaponized as part of targeted theorizing? In what ways do creators who engage in
normative discourses (reinforcing the targeted theory), those who engage in critical
discourses (challenging the targeted theory), and the creators who are themselves
targeted, interact, converse, and influence one another?

This project traces the rise and fall of three case studies of targeted theories on TikTok,
and the normative and critical discourses that emerge around them. In addition to Stella,
other TikTok creators who have been subject to targeted theorization include The



Daydream Collective, a person with dissociative identity disorder who was bullied off2

the platform after being accused of faking their mental illness (Colombo 2022); and
Couch Guy, whose “weird vibes” in a video of his long-distance girlfriend surprising him
with a visit resulted in speculation that he was cheating.

Almost overnight, these creators became the subject of ridicule and loathing from
astounding numbers of TikTok users. Creators who are targeted often become
memeified, going so viral that references to them are instantly recognizable. The
amateur investigative digilantism (Nhan, Huey, and Broll 2017) of creators who posit
targeted theories is based in moral panic: they rally against perceived trafficking or
murder (in Stella’s case), lying, lack of authenticity, or attention seeking (The Daydream
Collective), and cheating or deception in a monogamous relationship (Couch Guy).
Online harassment and logics of morality go hand-in-hand (Marwick 2021).

Further Questions
Some big-picture questions to be answered in future research follow. What are the
consequences of targeted theories, for the creators who are targeted, in particular those
with marginalized identities? How does targeted theorizing reveal the shapes of existing
power structures? That is, how might such crises of virality on TikTok exemplify and
reveal the wider system of algorithmic harms (Noble 2018) faced by marginalized
people online?

References

Aten, Jason. “Instagram Reels Copies TikTok, and Is an Example of Everything Wrong
With Facebook.” Inc, August 6, 2020.

Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” In The
SAGE Handbook of Social Media, by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell,
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2018.

Colombo, Charlotte. “Viral ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ TikToker Sparks Questions
About the Internet’s Effect on Mental Health.” Rolling Stone (blog), January 15, 2022.

Eadon, Yvonne. “‘Useful Information Turned into Something Useless’: Archival Silences,
Imagined Records, and Suspicion of Mediated Information in the JFK Assassination
Collection.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 15, no. 2
(2019).

Kaye, D Bondy Valdovinos. “You Made This? I Made This: Practices of Authorship and
(Mis)Attribution on TikTok,” 2021, 21.

2 The Fantasy Collective is also a pseudonym. Couch Guy was not given a pseudonym due to the fact
that his name is not used in public discussions of the incident.

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/instagram-reels-is-a-copy-of-tiktok-an-example-of-everything-wrong-with-facebook.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/wonderland-system-tiktok-dissociative-identity-disorder-1283571/


Le Compte, Daniel, and Daniel Klug. “‘It’s Viral!’ -- A Study of the Behaviors, Practices,
and Motivations of TikTok Social Activists.” ArXiv:2106.08813 [Cs], June 16, 2021.

Marwick, Alice E. “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative
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Nhan, Johnny, Laura Huey, and Ryan Broll. “Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing
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Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce
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Rieder, Bernhard, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Òscar Coromina. “From Ranking
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Romano, Aja. “Understanding Silence of the Lambs’ Complicated Cultural Legacy.”
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http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08813
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