"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker
londoncentric.media91 points by pbshgthm 40 minutes ago
91 points by pbshgthm 40 minutes ago
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
I always remember this excellent sci-fi story about exactly such things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.
there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
I bet there are many well-moneyed interests that would benefit from discord and conflicts in the Western society writ large.
A worldwide social network is subject to the worldwide political pressures, like any other media would be.
I think it might be related to support disrupting the US work visa process somehow. Like the strange "actually Indians" meme on Reddit etc.
A lot of hateful content is boosted by Russian bots, there were also instances of bot accounts that went silent with Iran internet blackout.
Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia.
This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies.
The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse.
Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion.
At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.
I suppose it's possible but I think the more basic answer is that there's been a huge influx of Indians into the west recently i.e. find an example historically where people don't end up fighting in such situations.
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme.
> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
TikTok's algorithm makes follower counts less important than they are on other platforms. The means by which your video gets into people's FYP feed is not very clear but it is very, very common to see content from someone you do not follow, and I think if it shows positive engagement stats it'll get shown to more and more people.
I would assume part of the payout rate would also be determined by level of engagement of those followers, or also people who are not subscribed but are still sitting through your content.
TikTok should be sowed with salt like Carthage back then...along with these hate-influencers. We need new social media now.
As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.
I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.
“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.”
I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws.
Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
Pseudonymity is sufficient to curb most antisocial behaviour on social media. A site operator doesn't need to know a malicious user's name but the operator should be able to permanently block someone.
It isn't necessary for anyone to be the arbiter of truth, but some body should be the arbiter of good taste. That someone doesn't need to be the government; it can be the community. Since good taste is subjective, it should be defined democratically.
At this point in history, it seems that unless social media has some mechanism to promote civilised behaviour, society will lose the ability to advance and improve.
This person wasn’t anonymous to TikTok. They were doing this for payments.
TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too.
Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story
> In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects.
Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.
There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.
But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
> imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like.
Which is why if we passed laws against this kind of thing they shouldn't make posting what the king doesn't like illegal. They should explicitly make it illegal to post disinformation harmful to others. It should work similarly to defamation laws where it makes no difference if you publish something someone else (king or not) doesn't like, as long as it's actually true.
That's why I said it was a fantasy, and why I didn't suggest it as policy.
There is such a thing as objective truth and objective lies, though, don't deny that.
A reasonable compromise might be to require ID before payments are made to people.
In a lot of places this is required by KYC regulations anyway.
I have the same dilemma. Privacy and anonymity has always been a top priority for me, but we can't excuse malicious actors, we shouldn't even accommodate people with good intentions but misguided means if the outcomes are so clearly detrimental to society.
I don't think there is a good answer without limiting freedoms in either direction, and I don't envy the people in government that are earnestly trying to do good for their constituents but are struggling with a solution.
We need laws to stop this sort of thing for sure. I love the first amendment but we place sane limits on it all the time. This seems like one of those things cases where it's easy to draw the line and when people are being paid it's easy to trace the money to those responsible
> This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
There is no codified constitution in the United Kingdom.
Don’t forget that not only they can do that, but they also disproportionate amount of damage (see US elections).
You are conflating different things. Anonymous or not, people can post hate on the Internet. That's a question of moderation.
Personally I think it would be easier to just ban anything that is political altogether. Bluesky for example is 90% politics. Just because something can be allowed in some spaces on the Internet that doesn't mean it should be allowed on every single space. No reason for the "funny short video" platform to become a news/opinion essay platform.
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it.
The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
For what it's worth living in NYC often feels the same. There are people who live on Long Island - many just an hour or so from the city - who are convinced it's a hellscape here.
Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.
It's definitely being pushed by people looking for views but there is obviously some truth to it when half the businesses around Leicester Square are completely empty frauds.
One of the "British" racist social media posters turned out to be Pakistani, another Sri Lankan: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
Both in it for the money.
It's such a bummer to see such blatant manipulation, and even worse to see people buy into it wholesale.
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You’ve been baited, that’s how they do it.
I'm not baiting. I just think a lot of people have their heads in the sand.
I imagine that happens when a state deliberately causes enough disruption in areas where the majority of its inhabitants are left with little choice but to uproot their livelihoods to move in with their abusers.
Chickens coming home to roost