So Long, Farewell!

Thank you all for reading!

Hi!

Welcome to the last email you will get from TikTokTrends.

This adventure of mine has unfortunately come to an end.

After 27 weeks and over 200 subscribers, I have decided to end TikTokTrends.

I started this newsletter to achieve two things: write consistently every week to gain writing, editing, and publishing experience and to show the world that TikTok was not all fun and games, but politics played a big role in the content published there.

I believe I have achieved both goals—27 weeks of consistent writing, with my editing and writing skills getting better each week. I was also able to show over 200 people that TikTok, was in fact, a very political platform.

During my 27 weeks, I saw the rise and the fall of the ‘Conservative TikTok.’ In the early days of my newsletter, misinformation was easy to find; it was almost as easy to find as a dance video. But as time progressed, as misinformation began to affect people, TikTok started to delete and shutdown content creators who misinformed the public. Their view’s dropped and was no longer trending on TikTok.

After the January 6th Insurrection, this was even more evident. Accounts I followed began migrating to other platforms, and their content diminished.

This is, of course, not the reason for my sudden stop in content creation. As many of you know, I recently started working as a Visual Verification Producer at ABC News. For me, this job is a lot of things, but mainly it is a step towards the direction I have always wanted to go -> Verification!

Since 2018 when I first learned about doing verification and fact-checking, I knew I wanted to do something about it. I worked on it during my master’s program and continued to do fact-checking and verification work as a CUNY Graduate, and now, here I am.

As a journalist at ABC News, I have to limit my exposure to unverified content and limit what I post about it online. I have to be careful about what I tweet and write about on social media. This newsletter would have been no exception. The legal consequences are no longer only getting a fact wrong, but it would be misinforming the general public as an ABC News Journalist, risking my reputation and ABC’s. A risk that I will not be taking.

I want to thank every one of you who subscribed, shared, liked, commented, replied, or just took time out of your day to read my work. I sincerely thank you all. I would not have been able to do any of this without you!

I’m always on Twitter, and Instagram and my email will not change: kereminal@gmail.com, so let’s connect sometime!

For those interested in reading weekly TikTok content, Understanding TikTok by Marcus Bösch is an amazing read!

Wishing every one of you all the best!

Sincerely,

Kerem Inal