About a month ago, I wrote about a viral book on “lost” herbal remedies that, at the time, sold 60,000 copies on the TikTok Shop despite appearing to violate some of the app’s policies on health misinformation. The book’s sales were boosted by popular videos on the app, some with millions of views, by wellness influencers who falsely claimed the once-obscure 2019 book contained natural cures for cancer and other ailments.
Influencers including TikTok have made money selling this misleading book. I have brought all this to Tiktok’s attention. The videos I flagged to a company spokesperson were removed after being reviewed for violating TikTok’s policy prohibiting health misinformation.
The book remains for sale in stores, and new influencers enter. Still, I didn’t stop watching TikTok Shop promotions for this book, Herbal Remedies Book, from.
“This is where they’re trying to ban this book,” said the video of a TikTok shop seller, pointing to the book’s list of herbal cancer treatments. Later, he urged his viewers to click on a link to the store’s listing and buy immediately because “it probably won’t last forever because of what’s inside.”
The video received over 2 million views in two days. Click through the link provided and you will see that sales of the book have doubled since my article came out. Book of Herbal Remedies has sold over 125,000 copies through TikTok Shop’s e-commerce platform on TikTok alone. The book’s popularity doesn’t stop there, though: As of June 5, it’s the No. 6 best-selling book on Amazon and has been on Amazon’s bestseller list for seven weeks and counting.
The “Invisible Ruler” of Online Attention
I dug into what I thought about my experience Book of Herbal Remedies Time to read upcoming books The invisible rulers, by Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renee DiResta. The book examines and contextually explains how bad information and “Deliberate reality“became powerful and prominent. He writes how the “collision of rumor mills and propaganda machines” on social media has helped form a trinity of influencers, algorithms and crowds that work to catapult pseudo-events, Twitter protagonists and conspiracy theories that garner attention. did and shattered consensus and belief.
DiResta’s book is part history, part analysis, and part memoir, as it ranges from a pre-Internet examination of the psychology of rumors and propaganda to the biggest moments of online conspiracy and harassment since the social media age. Ultimately, DiResta applied what he had learned through a decade of closely researching online confusion, manipulation and abuse, to his personal experience of being the target of a series of baseless allegations that, despite a lack of evidence, prompted Rep. Jim Jordan. , as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Arming the Federal Government, to Start an investigation.
There’s a really understandable instinct that, I think, a lot of people have when they read about misinformation or confusion online: they want to know why it’s happening and who’s responsible, and they want the answer to be simple. so, meme-fied argument About the “Russian bots” that helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Or, perhaps, push a person who went viral for saying something wrong and hurtful. Or the belief that we can content-moderate our way out of online harm entirely.
DiResta’s book explains why these approaches will always fall short. Blaming “algorithms” for a dangerous viral trend may seem satisfying, but algorithms have never operated without human choice. As Diresta writes, “virality is a collective behavior.” Algorithms can surface and nudge and block, but they need user data to do so effectively.
Analogy, panic and resistance
Writing about personal viral rumors, conspiracy theories, and products can sometimes feel like telling anecdotes: Book of Herbal Remedies The TikTok shop becomes instructive about its ability to become a bestseller, as long as influencers are good enough to push the product.
Most of these instances of misinformation do not have neat or happy endings. Disinformation Reporter Ali Breland, In her final piece for Mother Jones, writes about how QAnon becomes “everything”. To do so, Breland begins with the example of Wayfair, the cheap furniture retailer that became the focus of a moral panic about pedophiles.
This moment in the history of online terror, which also features heavily in DiResta’s book, occurred in the summer of 2020, after many QAnon influencers and activity hubs were banned from mainstream social media (which, incidentally, I interviewed DiResta for at the time). To ask a piece of question (whether such action is too late to have any meaningful effect on QAnon’s influence).
Here’s what happened: Someone noticed online that Wayfair was selling expensive cabinets. Cabinets had feminine names. The person draws some mental dots and connects them: Of course, these lists must be coded evidence of a child trafficking ring. The idea caught fire in the QAnon space and spread quickly Even after that Paranoia Enclave co-opted a real hashtag used to raise awareness of the wild and perverse concept of human trafficking, which interfered with the factual investigation.
Breland, in his Mother Jones piece, tracking how the central tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory expanded beyond its believers and remained there. Now, “[W]e They are in an age of obsessive, grotesque and pervasive fear about pedophilia—where QAnon’s paranoid thinking is no longer tied to the political fringes of middle-aged posters and boomers lost in cyberspace,” he wrote.
Wayfair moral panics didn’t just become a trend because of bad algorithms; It was proof that the attention QAnon had previously garnered had worked. Ban its hashtags and its influencers, but the crowd remains, and we’ve been in it to some degree.
The Book of Herbal Remedies Flowing through some well-worn grooves has become a bestseller. The influencers promoting it knew what they could and couldn’t say from a moderation standpoint, and when those who broke the rules were removed, new influencers moved in to earn those commissions. My article, and my efforts to bring this trend to TikTok’s attention, really did nothing to reduce the demand for this misguided book. So, what will work?
DiResta’s idea for this echo conversation has been happening among misinformation experts for some time. There are things the platform should do purely from a moderation perspective, such as removing auto-trending topics, introducing friction to engage with certain online content, and generally giving users more control over what they see in their feed and from their community. DiResta also mentions the importance of education and prebanking, which is a more preventative version of focusing on misinformation. Techniques and tropes Online manipulation. Also, transparency.
If there was a public database of moderation actions from the platform, would people believe that there isn’t a vast conspiracy to censor conservatives on social media? Would people be less inclined to buy a book on dubious natural cures if they knew more about the commissions earned by influencers promoting it? I may not know!
I do know this, though: after a decade of online culture and manipulation of information, I don’t think I’ve ever seen things quite as bad as they do now. It’s worth trying, at least, something.
