Skip This Video. Kill My Family

“I’ll never get over my first heartbreak.” The first slide in a TikTok photo-carousel post will read. The familiar white text outlined in black sits over a blurry photo of a blonde college student at a sports game. The heartbroken speaker, we assume. An absentminded swipe delivers the set-up for the now-viral post format: “What, like an ex?” You’ve seen posts like this before. A dead pet, a disappointing season finale, a fandom inside-joke, or gratuitous trauma-dump. You wonder what the pretty girls of the internet might have to share this time. You swipe without thinking.

The whiplash is familiar by now. A crying Gazan child holds an empty bowl, his grimy face is tear-stained and taut. Hungry. The text is rushed, pleading, as if clinging to the last seconds of the viewers interest. “I know you will skip but we need 20s of your time to save us” or “Please don’t skip, your likes and comments will save us.” The first feeling is shame. You’re disgusted by your curiosity. All of a sudden, the heartbroken blonde seems so petty, so trivial. And yet you swiped.

The truth is, the Palestinians in Gaza who are using TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program to fundraise their survival knew that you would swipe. They wagered their life on it. Gazan families have been forced into becoming overnight experts in the seemingly allusive inner-workings of the capital-A Algorithm.

With Israel’s deliberate blockade of aid entering the besieged Gaza Strip, the quickly dwindling reserves of essential items has meant that the price of food and fuel has risen at uncontrollable rates. According to The World Bank, inflation in Gaza has increased by 127.87%. This, combined with the almost complete decimation of Gaza’s economy leaves it’s famished population deadlocked in an unsurmountable deficit.

So-called joint-efforts by the United States and Israel to deliver aid have been nothing more than deadly gestures of political theatre. Aid distribution sites managed by the American GHF have become the site of dozens of reported mass-shootings, in which IDF soldiers and armed private contractors tasked with running the facility have opened fire on masses of Palestinians awaiting aid. As of writing, over 2000 people have been murdered in this way. Increasingly, Palestinians in Gaza are forgoing the deceptive promise of aid at these site for fear of their lives.

The inflationary crisis deepens with the arrival of air-drops. Alongside many leading aid organisations, UNRWA condemns them as “expensive [and] inefficient.” This is because, aside from not delivering enough aid quantitatively, air-drops do not distribute aid but merely deliver it. With no designated recipient on the ground to manage the goods, hungry crowds defend upon the meagre packages in a desperate attempt to grab what they can. An air-drop of flour leaves a Gazan family in need of fuel, sugar, or oil with no choice but to sell what they have managed to gather amongst the chaos. To afford what they need, the product is reintroduced to the market at an inflated price. And so, the stalemate continues.

In times like these, there is no possibility of earning the funds necessary to survive a famine from within the caged-off Gaza Strip. It must be sought elsewhere. And with no goods to sell internationally, and no service infrastructure spared by Israel’s bombardment, the idea of trading attention for survival emerges as their final lifeline.

Much has been said and written about the aptly named Attention Economy. The price of an advertisement is really just the price of the viewers attention to it. An un-skippable ad on YouTube costs more than the corner of a newspaper paper page because the premium is placed on your undivided captive attention. On an app like TikTok, however, each creator has the opportunity to ‘sell’ their profile directly to TikTok itself. And TikTok is ready to reward the most captivating, rewatchable, resharable, and repostable content at their PPV (pay-per-view) rate. For each 1000 “qualified” views (we’ll get to this later) TikTok will pay the creator between $0.02 and $0.04. To afford a kilogram of sugar in Gaza, a video would need 2,000,000 at the very least.

Hitting it big on TikTok is sort of like winning the lottery. For a long time, trying to understand the strange and unpredictable behaviour of the algorithm and its recipients has stumped those seeking to capitalise on it. But when getting a viral video makes the difference between dying today and tomorrow, those in Gaza have created perhaps the largest mass fundraising campaign in the clock app’s history.

Step one is simple: Identify what people are willing to watch. Remember, TikTok only pays for “qualified” views. These views must come from engaged accounts (real people using active, “engaged” profiles) who watch the video for more than 5 seconds. It’s not about views, its about viewers. What are the everyday scrollers of TikTok watching? The right video cannot emerge as a “fundraising video”, it has to be dressed up in virality.

Step two is where the gamble in introduced. What are the chances of a video in a trending format going viral when everyone, Palestinian or otherwise, is trying their luck at the same coin toss? The video only needs to appear a certain way to arrive on the FYP, but it’s what viewers do once it’s there that arguably matters the most. You see, scrolling on TikTok isn’t just the product of the algorithm, it is the algorithm. With each engagement (or skip) viewers are essentially rating the content they see, and TikTok uses this behaviour to decide whether on not to deliver it to more viewers or retire it at single-digit viewership.

This is the formula that Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly reliant upon: the bait and switch. Using a trending sound or format means that TikTok is more likely to push the video out as soon it’s posted. This is the first assessment, and it’s made internally by the app. Once the video is out, Palestinians must ensure that those initial viewers tell TikTok that this video is worth pushing further. Now, there’s no point leaving it up to luck, this is when the jig is up. Sympathy is a more reliable gamble than organic virality. But the sympathy of an increasingly apathetic western public needs stoking. More and more, it requires force to dislodge.

“I will not forgive you if you skip me” “I will complain to Allah about everyone who skips this video” “Skip me, kill me, starve me” “If you skip this video, you will kill my family” Direct address. You there, watching this video, I need just 20 seconds. Palestinians on the app must play their survival against the triviality of what it is they are asking for. It is an open, undisguised trade deal. My life is worth 10 seconds of your time.

The most lethal response to the video is a skip. The sooner, the deadlier. Videos that are skipped over in an instant send an unmistakable message to the algorithm. I won’t watch it, neither will anybody else. Fundraising videos might ensure that the first “bait” of a trending video is at least 5 seconds long. This means that a viewer who skips the second they see a Palestinian might at the very least have a chance of counting as a qualified view. One potentially qualified view. That’s $0.00002. Once we digest the numbers, views and likes (increasingly read: trivial popularity contest) begin to translate into real hunger, real suffering, real life.

Okay, and for those that stay? Well, if they’re lucky, starving Palestinians in Gaza will finally have the attention of some, but most people on TikTok don’t know what it is they’re actually doing when they engage. More and more, those in Gaza are having to deliver a set of instructions to make every viewer the perfect one. But careful now, if people begin interacting with your video in a way that would identify it to the algorithm as a “Gaza fundraising post” then TikTok will begin treating like one. The sad reality is that Palestine activism is a niche on TikTok, like archive Paul Smith is, or 2hollis, or edits of a Netflix show that got cancelled after 1 season. And TikTok is good at sending videos to the right niche, but niche isn’t enough when the price of survival is millions of views.

“Labubu Dubai Chocolate” “Giorgio Armani Dead” “Sidney Sweeney N word” These are just some examples of the topics that Palestinians in Gaza are requesting their viewers to discuss in the comments. The good news is that TikTok doesn’t actually know what each and every video is about, but it can guess (almost always correctly) based on the shape it leaves; a trail of clues left by viewers. Comments are an obvious one. But the new blue comment feature allows TikTok to connect videos with what users search after watching. This is a powerful feature; it’s the equivalent of putting a delivery address on a video. And if videos manage to disguise themselves with an ultra-hot ultra-viral search term, that’s the winning ticket.

If a user searches Labubu whilst watching a video, and the comments are full with the mention of them, and the video itself includes the word in its caption or in-video text, then that video is virtually indistinguishable to the algorithm from a video that’s only about Labubu’s, and not also a genocide.

At the end of all this, Palestinians still haven’t managed to fundraise their cost of surviving a famine on the internet. But the money they have made has made all the difference, and I keep this in mind each time I comment “wait giorgio armani died omg???!” knowing that his death makes a video more valuable than the preventable death of a malnourished child in Gaza. But I comment anyway, and so should you. If I could say anything, I would tell you that I, too, am complaining to Allah about those that skip, and if you think no one is watching you: know that the algorithm is, and its judging you almost as much as I am.

So where does that leave us? It’s one thing so describe what is happening on the app, and why. Explaining the dirty feeling it leaves us with is another. Many folks have described the necessity of videos like these as “dystopian” and it’s a fair enough analysis. Like much of our increasingly techno-feudal reality, the jarring juxtaposition of trivial trends and mindless consumption with unimaginable daily suffering is forcing us to contend with the dirty, uncomfortable substrata hiding beneath our “business as usual.” When stupid AI videos cost clean drinking water that millions go without, or when micro-trends are made for less than pennies by young girls in Bangladesh, or when discussing cute hairstyles for small dogs allows a starving family in Gaza to live another day, its hard not to decide that, now, nothing is trivial. And undeniably, the internet has finally become “real life.”