What the Hearts Were Really For
Musical.ly launched in 2014 as an app where teenagers lip-synced to pop songs and posted the results. Short videos, phone camera, Shake It Off in the background, maybe a dance move. TikTok would absorb it in 2018 and scale the concept to something globally dominant, but in its earlier form Musical.ly was smaller, less moderated, and considerably darker than its premise suggested.
The mechanism worked like this: a young girl—and the users skewed very young, younger than any parental notification probably captured—would post a lip-sync video and accumulate hearts. The hearts came from other users. Many of those users were adult men. The hearts kept coming when the dancing got more provocative, the outfits more minimal, the camera angles more deliberate. The girls understood the correlation. Some of them were eight years old.
Inga Pöting reported on this for Die Zeit in 2018, and her description of scrolling through the app reads like a grimly methodical inventory. A made-up girl emoting to a love song. A girl in a hoodie doing a split-screen dance with a cartoon character. Musical.ly stars Lisa and Lena performing The Monster with their fingers shaped into claws. And then, further down, children in underwear sitting with their legs open, phone pointed at their lap, collecting hundreds of hearts and comments reading hot
and sexy.
The girls didn’t need to speak English to understand those words.
The men who gathered this material operated through a feature called "featuring"—curating themed profiles of girls’ videos, ostensibly to help the talent reach a bigger audience. The girls submitted their videos by direct message. They did it willingly. The accounts doing the featuring had names that translated to roughly the same thing in any language.
Alex Zhu, who co-founded Musical.ly, said in a 2016 interview that the company was working hard to make the platform safe for all users. That’s a sentence every platform founder has said, in some form, about every platform. It means exactly as much as it always has.
What’s hard to sit with is the feedback architecture. These girls understood on some level that the attention from older men was tied to what they were showing. The likes were a conditioning system. They were being trained into it—not by a single legible act of coercion but gradually, incrementally, by what got rewarded. The platform was the mechanism. The girls were eight.
Musical.ly is gone now, absorbed into TikTok, which has its own version of this problem at vastly larger scale. The specific dynamic Pöting described didn’t disappear with the rebranding. It migrated, adapted, found new infrastructure. The hearts kept coming.