Subway Surfers, Family Guy, and TikTok: MKULTRA II?

By IAN DE MELLO
Staff Writer

If you are an avid user of TikTok, you may already know what the title is referring to. If you don’t know, there is a growing trend in TikTok videos that seems to follow an incredibly specific format that is being replicated en masse. The main video, usually positioned at the top, will be either a Family Guy clip or a TTS (text-to-speech) of an internet story. Strange, but it is by no means an abnormal phenomenon for the massive heaps of trash that are TikTok videos. But one thing makes it stand out. At the bottom of the video will be a clip of someone playing Subway Surfers. It’s either this or they use a Minecraft parkour video, however, there are a couple lesser known variants such as cutting soap videos. Some are an unholy mash of all of these different videos, creating a sensory overload abomination. These have become increasingly common and many find these videos flooding their “for you” pages. And it isn’t just one account. It’s multiple, an army of accounts that repost these videos.

Farming Engagement

The vast majority of video-based platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, rate videos on their levels of “engagement”, which is how long the typical viewer stays on the video. Some have theorized that bot farms are using these videos as a way to farm engagement in massive waves to artificially have their videos promoted ad infinitum in a feedback loop. How could this strategy lead to people staying on videos longer? It’s quite simple, they will usually have a “satisfying” video or something mesmerizing that will keep the reader hooked at that bottom video while the normal video plays until it ends. It is quite common knowledge that human attention spans are shrinking, no doubt due to social media, and that this is a clever if downright immoral trick that keeps people engaged with their videos. This is obviously so that these bot farms can monetize their accounts by reaching a wider audience and casting a broad enough net to maximize profits. It is probable to assume that hundreds of these bot accounts are controlled by one person or organization for this exact reason. However, there is a more nasty and blatant variant of these videos.

Corporate Brainwashing

As stated before, the more blatant versions blend this formula with advertising. Typically at the bottom-most of the page, there will be the advertisement, followed by the “satisfying” video, and then the proper video at the top. Whether these are independents using advertisements for an extra stream of revenue or a coordinated corporate attempt to subliminally persuade people to buy their products or even a potential mix of both is unknown.

MKUltra II

MKUltra, if you do not know, was a United States government program that inhumanely experimented with drugs, psychological and physical torture, and other terrible methods, to find a way to completely take control over a human being. This program was shut down in 1973 after the experiments went bust, at least supposedly. Could this be another government-backed experiment regarding the lowered attention spans of humans? Seeing how massively replicated these videos are, with them following the exact format to a tee, it could be reasoned that this could be orchestrated by a government. It may not even be the United States, but it may be a clever tactic used by the Chinese government, which owns TikTok. Ever since TikTok came out, fears of it being spyware were always present and these fears were eventually proven true after a slew of information came out that detailed the collection of user information far beyond what it needs to operate. This may be just another scheme to keep users engaged with the app for longer, collect more information, and further weaken the Western attention span for their ultimate goal of world domination.