At first, it was one tiktok out of forty. But, it quickly turned into one tiktok out of thirty, three out of twenty, and now, one out of four. It was a seemingly harmless clip pairing a segment of a particular episode of Family Guy, the popular American animated sitcom following the Griffin family, with a somewhat-satisfying clip of someone filling a hollow pipe with various materials. Sometimes, the episode was paired with a clip of someone playing one of those mindless mobile games you’ve probably seen ads for. The frequency of these Tiktoks on my For-You-Page (FYP) grew almost exponentially, before I could even realize what was happening—the Family Guy pipeline incident.
Apparently, I was not the only one this was happening to. The Tiktok algorithm had noticed that people were spending large amounts of time watching this Family Guy-pipeline clip pair. It began to recommend a search bar titled, “Family Guy pipeline incident” to the search bar. Unknowing comment section lurkers would click on this search engine, entrapping them into this extensive Tiktok trend. Whole accounts are dedicated to showing entire episodes of Family Guy in fragments, from parts 1 to 20, and somehow, they seem to get away with the issue of copyright. To add onto that, it’s hard to find a clip of an episode that other users haven’t interacted with in some form or another. People seem to be showing a newfound interest in Family Guy because of these Tiktoks.
It’s through this incident that I realized that this is how social media works. At first, they give you a taste of what’s popular, see if it’s really for you. Then, they seamlessly incorporate it into your recommended page until you don’t even realize that it’s taken over your FYP completely. While I can’t say that an overload of Family Guy content is dangerous to my life, it has been very addicting. I’d never watch Family Guy in my free time on the television, but knowing that it’s just a short clip of an episode fascinatingly lures me in. It’s been an interesting and reflective time for me, witnessing how easily my for-you-page, and thus, my fleeting interests are manipulated by social media algorithms.