147: The Vib(e)-O-Cracy

TikTok has finally signed the deal

Hello.

you are reading Understanding Tiktok. My name is Marcus. 🚨 TikTok has finally signed a deal 🚨 to sell its U.S. business to three American investors — Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX — ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States. Yeah, but how? The algorithms retrained on U.S. user data, the entire farce driven by geopolitical factors (#146) with more unhingend memes, slop, and dark signal circulation beyond surface level noise. Welcome to the vibocracy – where legitimacy is enacted rather than negotiated in volatile, performative arenas.

😵‍💫 From Vibe to Vib(e)-O-Cracy
🌊 Flood til you can’t flood no more
🎒 TikTok projects i worked on in 2025

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😵‍💫 From Vibe to Vib(e)-O-Cracy

Ever since Kyle Chayka’s TikTok and the Vibes Revival article from April 2021 i have used the term to describe, explain and understand TikTok. The great appeal always posed the greatest challenge as vibes serve as a placeholder for abstract qualities that you can’t pin down, representing a type of understanding that exists before words can even name the experience.

The term and its usage have evolved including a vibe shift (2022), a vibecession (2022), then corporate mainstreaming via vibe check (2023) and a “no thoughts, just vibes”-vibe, finally turning into vibeocracy (2024).

With vibeocracy P.E. Moskowitz in the summer of 2024 coined a political and social system where vibes replace traditional ideologies, policy, or objective facts with
the primacy of feeling over fact, aesthetic governance, and the end of shared truth. One year later Jacqueline Fendt (Emeritus Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School) got rid of the “e” and turned vibeocracy into vibocracy: a more formal sociological framework.

While P.E. Moskowitz describe the feeling of living in a vibe-driven world, Fendt describes the new system of government that has emerged because of it. You see Donald Trump hovering over the text as Fendt explains how societies move from “arguing over facts” to “competing over vibes”, where corruption is treated as a genre of performance, and where an audience accepts things as true, regardless of evidence if they feel right.

All of this happens in a “neo-oral” environment via audio-visual fragments (TikToks, memes, sound snippets) that vibe. A symptom and a product of contemporary media infrastructures where epistemic authority shifts.

Deep into the thoughtless hypnotism of TikTok one afternoon, I came upon an anonymous urban scene from inside a residential tower in Manchester, England. On an upper floor, beside huge windows shrouded in fog, a man was floating on his back in a gleaming pool, to the soundtrack of the plaintive Frank Ocean song “White Ferrari.” The ten-second video was hashtagged #vibin. Kyle Chayka in 2021.

White Ferrari was released in August 2016, three months before the 2016 US Presidental Election. But now it is 9 years on. 2025. The year we lived alt-2016 and debated everything.

🌊 Flood til you can’t flood no more

Hans Eijkelboom

The British Economist and “America’s Most Trusted Dictionary” agree: Slop is the word of the year. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was “soft mud” now it is defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. {#146} In 2024 we had Shrimp Jesus. In December 2025 we have:

• ‪TikTok spam accounts posting strangely similar AI-generated videos of nonexistent Black people (Conspirador Norteño)

• Ultrarealistic AI videos attempt to portray Ukrainian soldiers in peril (NBC)

• Thousands of AI videos featuring sexualised minors shared on TikTok (Euronews)

• Deepfakes of UK Prime Minister Flood TikTok (Newsguard)

• A16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers (404 Media)

• Agentic Al Accounts Flood TikTok With Harmful Content (AI Forensics)

• AI Slop for Babies (Bloomberg)

People of the Twenty-First Century

Now what?! China is cracking down on AI slop. The rules read like a shopping list of badly needed regulations in the US, writes Futurism.com. And while i embrace regulation in the cases mentioned above i’d politely point to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights¹ and hesitate fully participating in another moral panic. By the way: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles take a stance against slop (Polygon) and so can you. Just turn the noise down (qz) or maybe a walk in the park (Beach House) when it’s cold outside (Erasure).

🎒 TikTok projects i worked on in 2025

#AI – Together with the cool team of AI Forensics i helped write a report on Agentic AI Accounts: Stanusch, N., Degeling, M., Buse Çetin, R., Bösch, M., Romano, S. (2025). Prompt, Upload, Repeat: How Agentic Al Accounts Flood TikTok With Harmful Content. AI Forensics https://aiforensics.org/work/agentic-ai-accounts

#Livestreaming – I joined the Digital Methods Summer School at University of Amsterdam to research TikTok livestreams and extremism: Van Boheemen, P., Bösch, M., Costanzo, G., Divon, T., Frühwirth, L., Hammelburg, E., & Wang, X. (2025). Live-Streaming: Mapping Networks of Influence and (Dis) information Flow. Digital Methods https://www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2025LiveStreaming

#Audio Memes – Together with Marloes i wrote a book chapter on malicious earworms, building up on previous research on audio memes: Geboers, M., & Bösch, M. (2025). Malicious earworms and useful memes, how the far-right surfs on TikTok audio trends (arXiv: 2506.20695). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.20695

#PoliticalCampaigning – For Friedrich Ebert Foundation i produced a research report about the German Federal Election 2025 on TikTok together with Jolan Geusen (German): Bösch, M., Geusen, J. (2025). Swipe, like, vote : Analyse des Bundestagswahlkampfs 2025 auf TikTok. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V., Mai 2025. ISBN 978-3-98628-457-2

⚗️ In the pipeline: papers on thirst trap propaganda, synthetic propaganda and a closer look at audio memes, TikTok edits and vibes. Still out in the open: A meme curriculum for journalists and vague stuff including antimemes, vibocracy and the postdigital. Happy to discuss joint efforts and research proposals.

What else?

The Data Is In: The Washington Post Can’t Replace Its “TikTok Guy”. Legacy media can’t keep treating breakout creators as temporary assets or social experiments, they’re the connective tissue to new audiences. (Matt Karolian)

Politico has picked up on paneuropean propaganda, covered in #140 and #141

How TikTok works for digital diplomacy during conflict/war times: the cases of Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflicts (Journal of Information Technology & Politics)

What makes a good social video? (Link in Bio)

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in tailored insights, workshops, consulting, or policy support, feel free to get in touch. Here is Linkedin. Here is Bluesky. Ciao

1. “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice”. This choice obviously includes generative AI tools.