For-Who Page?

Can you guess which of these women gets compensation for posting on social media? If you guessed BOTH, you would be correct.

Both women make money off of social media by capitalizing on their follower connections. I relate to Maddy because I grew up with her, I relate to Bre because, to put it bluntly, TikTok told me to. Generally, Instagram leans into organic relatability, highlighting the posts of people who follow you back. TikTok, however, heavily relies on inorganic relatability: the people you see are the people who the algorithm guesses that you would resonate with the most. Let’s go back to our two examples.

Maddy has around 2000 followers on Instagram and about 1K on TikTok. In my conversation with her, she stated that her social media is still used largely as entertainment, but obviously, she isn’t going to turn down a monetary opportunity. Her payment model is commission, based on how many people use the codes that the brands instruct her to attach to her posts. This business model doesn’t require much time sacrifice on Maddy’s part, nor does it necessitate a very strong relationship between consumer and creator.

For example, if I like the swimsuit Maddy’s wearing in a sponsored post, I would probably still like it if someone else that I didn’t know was wearing it. Maddy’s role for brands is that of a facilitator; her getting commission for my purchase of the swimsuit is like the money Etsy shaves off of products sold on their site.

On the other hand, Bre, has over 50K followers on Instagram and just shy of 750K on TikTok. Clearly, she has a huge platform and as a result, social media is her full-time job; she spends “anywhere between 5-8 hours a day on social media.” Bre’s payment model is slightly more complicated than Maddy’s, having more ‘partnerships’ through continued postings on TikTok than no-strings-attached compensated posts. During our interview, she stated that she has signed with a talent agency which helps brands to maintain or get into contact with her. Bre went into more detail in a later question about compensation explaining that compensation doesn’t always come in money, but also through gifts and early access to new products.

This model of business is reliant on a much more avid fan base. In order for the partnership to continue, engagement on sponsored posts needs to be high, and in order for that to happen, fans need to keep coming back to Bre’s content. Insert the For You page.

Getting on the For You page is like roulette, except instead of chips, you’re playing with your salary.

You may see a creator you really resonate with on your FYP one day, but if you forget to like their video or don’t follow them immediately, you may literally never see them again. This phenomenon occurs because of both the oversaturation of available content and the natural limitations of an algorithm; the algorithm doesn’t and can’t recognize all the reasons why a user might like a creator; everything is categorized mathematically, so to TikTok, there’s no visible difference between Bre’s content and another influencer who posts similar content. Although it sounds dramatic, the personhood of the creator gets lost. Ross Douthat, a columnist for the NYT, describes this idea, in relation to fashion, in his op-ed about "the age of the algorithm", saying: “when enough brands and retailers begin using these inventory tactics and trend-prediction methods, the results homogenize over time.” TikTok’s algorithm isn’t all that different, except the items being sold are people.

Why does any of this matter? As artificial intelligence becomes more and more integrated into society, it’s important to have conversations about how “the FYP” and other data-processors make their decisions. In his article about the people behind algorithms, Sidney Fussel of The Atlantic discusses how it's dismissive to regard algorithms as their own entity because it gives their creators a pass for the biases they encode into it. Fussel went into detail regarding a recent scandal with Amazon, discussing the implications of a free market where bias is not denied, but also not actively eliminated.   

Similarly, one large issue with TikTok’s FYP is the lack of transparency on how that data is interpreted, and consequently why some posts make it on the FYP and some don’t. Several creators have voiced concerns about this topic, including those that I spoke to. When I asked about the competition for a spot on the For You page, Bre had the following to say: “The algorithm is so confusing. They say you have to be consistent, you have to engage with your followers, you have to post daily, you have to use trending sounds etc. and you can do all of those things and see great success for weeks on end and then all of the sudden the app stops pushing your videos for no apparent reason.”

Despite the For-You page quite literally being an algorithm, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how videos are selected for it. But since this hyper-curated content is obviously not randomized, who’s making these decisions? The implications of that answer are huge.

I’ll give you a personal example. I love reusable water bottles; I carry one everyday and have over 25 of them at home. The sole reason why I even discovered the bottle I have right now is because of TikTok. Not through ads from the company, but from posts –likely sponsored by the company— from creators raving about the bottle. This is relatively harmless because…it’s a water bottle, but let’s reimagine the story, but instead of a water bottle, it’s the university you enroll in, the car you drive, the anxiety medication you may or may not need to take. As nice as it is to get content displayed specifically for you, it relies on the watering-down of individuality into something that a processor can categorize in order to sell something related to that category. The beauty of being unique is getting muddied for capitalistic gain. The issue with the FYP is that in a time when we as a society are exiting the grasp of celebrity influence, we’re now entering the throngs of some entity or software engineer disguised as our “peers.”

 Adaora Edeoga is a first-year pre-med student double majoring in health science and nutritional sciences. In between her time spent desperately trying to grasp the concepts of chemistry, she devotes her hours to being a Trader Joe’s connoisseur, an energy drink fanatic, and, of course, a lifetime Directioner.