⌨️ ctrl + alt + TikTok
mooptopia and mia: i guess they never miss, huh?
You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: alt goes mainstream, Mia Khalifa finds her voice on TikTok and we go hopping mad for frogs named after us.
Drink up 🐸☕
this is mootopia’s world, we’re all just living in it
The path to TikTok fame never did run slow (cc. 👑Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae) but this one had us in bits. If you’ve been seeing 🔴👄🔴blowing up comments sections this week, it ain’t another 👁👄👁 (altho props team we stan 👏) but an ode to the newest and most beguiling-of-them-all alt TikTokers to ever grace the fyp.
Enter: Mooptopia. The faerie-like teen living rent-free on your fyp and serving up your daily dose of elite content. Moop is a mood, make no mistake.
TL;DR alt TikTok is the umbrella term to refer to the multiple subcultures (more on these later) that are housed within the app. You can tell when you’ve hit it: the Hype House is long gone and the weird and wonderful shit comes to the front of the queue, quite literally.
the moop diddy scoop
Moop’s real name is never disclosed (that’s a secret we’ll never tell 🐸☕️) but that doesn’t matter. Doing some quick detective work on TikTok shows her alias has 39M views and counting.
From joining the app in early June to earning close to 2M followers in little over a month, 200K per day in the last week (fyi not even Charli D’Amelio had that kinda clout in her first 30 days), Moop has successfully captured the hearts, minds and swipes of TikTok’s alt community. We must pay homage where it’s due and note that although relatively unknown to outsiders, TikTok’s alt-communties are successful in their own right and have grown in large pockets across the content ecosystem: frog TikTok, witch TikTok, even plague TikTok to name just a few. With her eclectic stoner aesthetic combined with VSCO girl energy (giving off wizard vibes that Cat Marnell would be proud of), Moop has successfully brought the app’s alt scene to the forefront in ways never seen. While gazing intently into the camera with her token bloodshot eyes and slumped side smile, Moop successfully boosts our serotonin levels and our appetite for more wild, and utterly mesmerising alt art.
Being a Z (ofc), securing the TikTok bag was only a hot sec away. 4 days ago, Moop added the link to her merch: a cute collection of pastel garms (VSCO girls are shaking) with her classic zooted eye trademark up front and center...right where it should be. We’re sold – as are all of her fans.
Although threatening to leave the app this week, after being falsely ‘outed’ as Trump supporter: “it’s been a hard time for me lately and i must part away from tiktok”, Moop returned 24 hours later with a TikTok to Ridin’ Solo that has 2.5M likes (beating the Jason Derulo’s original 1.8M likes). 👀
One Z (@dianagivesup) articulated Moop’s insane power so perfectly we had to include:
“jason derulo has entire production team for his tiktoks meanwhile a girl who’s always z00ted gets better engagement for zooming in on her kneecaps”
Honestly, FACTS. Watch her closely pals, we see a queen 🐝 emerging to represent them alt.
hit or miss
“we’re so sorry for the disrespect that she had to endure because of our song, justice for Mia” - iLOVEFRiDAY, June 30th 2020
There are some TikTok ear worms that have been stuck in our heads on loop (literally) for what feels like years – except this time we’re actually talking since 2018, back when TikTok was our cringey little secret 🐸☕. Context is important, this was a TikTok landscape that preceded Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, the Yeehaw agenda and still remained the domain of furries and cosplayers 🚫🧢.
We are, of course, talking about MiA KHALiFA by Atlanta-based duo iLOVEFRiDAY, aka the “Hit or Miss” Mia Khalifa diss trick, currently sitting at 3.3M videos on the platform (109M views on YouTube). Just two months after the song went viral on TikTok, it was re-released by Sony Music Entertainment in December 2018. You heard it here first: it pays to pay attention. No TikTok bop has ingrained itself more in the Gen Z(eitgest) canon and stayed on top since day one – trust me, zaddy. Speak “Hit or miss, I guess they never miss, huh” and the void will yell back: “You got a boyfriend, I bet he doesn’t kiss ya”. In fact, the song’s lyrics beat the likes of “I Don’t Care” by Sheeran and Bieber and “Wish You Were Gay” by our 👑Billie, on Genius in 2019.
If you’re looking for the blueprint, this is it.
Since then, #hitormiss, which itself became a TikTok challenge, has accrued 1.5B views 👁👄👁. But that’s not the tea we want to spill. What happened next is really worth writing about.
who is she?
“Gen Z has my creativity working overtime to keep up 😩😭 THANK YOU. Y’all are my trauma’s silver lining” (20.7M views, Mia’s TikTok from 6/27 )
It’s time to meet the woman of the hour herself: enter Mia Khalifa. Despite appearing in a total of just 11 films in the adult entertainment industry, over the span of 3 months in late 2014, Mia has remained at the forefront of this space – ranking #1 on Pornhub in 2014 and dropping only one place by 2018, the same year her diss track was released. News flash: Mia hasn’t seen a single penny since then. Royalties, anyone? We don’t her. And before we spill any more tea, let it be known that sex work *is* work and its participants and performers are often the most vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of the industry who hold the reins. Grab your tea, let’s talk about it.
“That hourly dissociative attack from remembering hundreds of millions of people’s impression of you is solely based on the lowest, most toxic, most uncharacteristic 3 months of your life when you were 21” - Mia Khalifa (TikTok, 6/18)
If there’s one good thing about 2020 (bold statement, we know), it’s been the seismic shift in the public perception of Mia Khalifa, all thanks to alt TikTok. Since joining the platform back in January, Mia has amassed just shy of 10M followers in less than six months. Not bad for “probably the most shameful thing that ever happened to Lebanon” – as one TikTok user commented.
The platform has given Mia space to reclaim her narrative, where she often makes content around her own experiences within this industry – utilizing meme culture (the audio is the message on TikTok, never forget) and dueting creators who have come out in support of her, under the hashtag #justiceformia (currently sitting at 52.7M views). This is important. As Mia’s exposure in-app grew, thanks to the popularization of the # and, of course, “commenting for the algorithm”, so increased her distribution. Once again, the genius of TikTok’s for your page removed all barriers to entry and pushed Mia’s fight to the forefront of our scrolling experiences. And trust us, it’s easy to get lost in the sauce of that never ending fyp.
But the battle is far from over. In response, Bangbros, the studio at the heart of this dispute (yeah, sorry about the name 🤢), clapped back with a cease & desist against Mia and have even set up a site to “counter” all of her claims, ofc most remain sourceless. Real classy work there, fellas. FYI: they’re still making a pretty penny off the back of these videos. Never ones to shy away from a challenge, Gen Z said: “hold our whiteclaw” and jumped to action. ‘Help Mia Khalifa’ (a Change petition, what else?!) has already hit 1.8M signatures. ✒️
“people dehumanize her on the daily...she has been slut shamed her entire life. We need to bully the hub to take down her vids. gen z” - a call to arms from TikTok user @iisabellabello under #justiceformia
When Mia found out about her petition, she hopped straight to TikTok, captioning her vid: “Can’t make fun of Elon Musk ever again, cause I’m naming my first born GenZ”. High Tea gang, we simply love to see it. And if that wasn’t the icing on the cake, iLOVEFRiDAY crawled out of the woodwork with an apology TikTok (they’re the new notes app apologies, icymi), stating “we made that song two years ago, we were young and we were dumb...moving forward we apologize to Mia Khalifa...no more diss songs...I am all for her videos getting taken down”.
Alt TikTok, you’ve done it again 👏. Justice for Mia? Watch this space.
another one bytes the dust
With Moop threatening to leave TikTok already this week, the alt exodus to byte is showing no signs of slowing. With a threat of TikTok hitting and quitting it on us growing ever more apparent, it’s clear that the team at byte are listening to their influx of new users and working to create more channels for Zs that pass the vibe check. Cue, /frogs, /alt, /witches and...wait for it...each channel has its own design which makes everything feel native and custom to each community. It’s lowkey an eclectic mix of subreddit, discord and TikTok. Okay, maybe we’ll byte.
High Tea 🐸☕ prediction: once byte’s channel creation opens up, you can bet our #phrog dollar we’ll see many communities diving in to create their own third spaces to hang out, especially with byte’s rapidly growing user base. Distribution is 👑. Stay tuned!
kettles on: ones to watch
🛍we don’t ship it. Listen, we’re all for social commerce. We dedicated a whole dispatch to it back in May. But Insta, wyd? This week the platform launched a new update that replaced the activity tab with a shop page. To say people are shook would be an understatement. It’s almost as if they don’t knowww that the only reason we’re using Insta these days is to keep connected to our pals during quarantine. Replacing it with ‘Shop’ when 32 million Americans are jobless feels...off.
💆♀️Twitter’s slack hack. You’ve no doubt heard the news, Elon, Kanye, Obama and many more big names had their accounts hacked on Twitter this week. Normally such dry news would not make it into our Sunday dispatch, but pals, this week we couldn’t resist. Hacker Kirk had got access to the Twitter credentials when, and we quote, “he found a way into Twitter’s internal Slack messaging channel and saw them posted there, along with a service that gave him access to the company’s servers.” Yes, Twitter had its login credentials pinned to a Slack channel. We’ll just leave this here...
🐸what_frog_you_are. Remember the days when you used to sift through the plastic keychains to find your name. Well, we’re doing the same thing on Insta. Enter the account @what_frog_you_are, a 219K strong Insta account that posts pics of frogs with your name in fancy rainbow font. Barely a week old and already receiving serious clout, frogs have since given rise to @whatdogareyou and @what_cow_you_are. Oh and just in case you were wondering, here’s us: 🐸🐮
Okay, you made it, now you can go back to getting justice for Mia.
ttyl,