Former staff and users tell the BBC the app's algorithm has encouraged harmful real-life behaviour.
TikTok is driving online frenzies that encourage anti-social behaviour in the real world, a BBC Three investigation reveals.
An online obsession with a murder case in Idaho, USA, that led to innocent people being falsely accusedSchool protests involving vandalism spreading across the UKEx-staffers at TikTok liken these frenzies to "wildfires" and describe them as "dangerous", especially as the app's audience can be young and impressionable.
When you post a video on TikTok, it will appear on the feeds of other users who TikTok thinks could be interested in it, rather than just being promoted to your friends and followers as on some other social networks. One TikTokker, Olivia, did not just become gripped by a drama thousands of miles from her home in Florida - she flew for more than six hours and filmed at the scene for a week. At least one of her videos reached 20 million views.
Olivia said the high levels of engagement on TikTok around subjects like the Idaho murders encourages users to create videos. "One video on TikTok could get millions of plays versus if I post the same video on Instagram, it'll get like 200 views. And it's just the algorithm of Tik Tok." She posted a video which falsely implied Nicola's best friend, Emma White, had posed as the missing woman, and says it received 3.6 million views within 72 hours.
She said the feeling of "empowerment" and "entitlement" from this attention can change people's behaviour.Heather says she regrets getting caught up in the frenzy on TikTok surrounding Nicola Bulley's disappearanceHeather never headed to the scene of the disappearance, but many other TikTokkers did. The police criticised the way people were, eventually issuing a dispersal order, which allows officers to remove people from the area to prevent anti-social behaviour.
In some cases, they also got out of hand: windows were smashed, trees were set on fire and teachers were assaulted."I feel like what TikTok is enabling people to do now is to take one thing that's viral in one school and transport it to like the whole region and make it a competition about who can up the other schools and make it more extreme," said Jasmine, a former TikTok moderator.
Comments under his videos included some teenagers in the UK saying they had been suspended or excluded from school after following Mr Markovac's advice. In one town, Viry-Châtillon, on the outskirts of Paris, videos showed a bus on fire and a ransacked newsagents. Jean-Marie Vilain, the mayor, said demonstrations were rare in the town.
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