It is safe to say that TikTok has successfully become one of the most globally used apps worldwide. The video hosting service owned by ByteDance is used by people to post content in the form of short videos, ranging from 3 seconds to 10 minutes. The social media platform has turned young teens like Charli D’Amelio, her sister Dixie D’Amelio, Bella Poarch, Avani Gregg, Addison Rae, Loren Gray, and Lil Huddy into millionaires. It has also been beneficial for some business owners as branding, marketing, and reaching a wider audience on the app is much easier than spending loads of money on TV and radio advertisements.
But what exactly is this app that has billions of people worldwide glued to their phone screens day and night? To answer this question simply, TikTok is an app that allows its users to both create and watch short video content. The majority of the app’s content is under roughly 15 seconds in length. The fast-paced modern life has made our attention spans shorter, and with the passage of time, we have started to crave shorter content to keep us entertained throughout the day.
Longer content seems bland and difficult to sit through. But these short bursts of distraction are perfect to watch on the go. Content is short, fun, and doesn’t require a lot of your time to be watched. This is one of the main reasons for the platform’s global popularity.
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The Community of Creators on TikTok
The wildly famous app has naturally led to the rise of a humungous community of creators. This has led to the rise of numerous micro-creators who have gained immense popularity, mostly just by doing low-effort dances and making lip-syncing videos on the platform. Thus, people acting strange on TikTok and justifying their behavior as part of an ongoing trend is not a new phenomenon.
Though not all the content on TikTok is strange and in poor taste, it is home to some of the weirdest creators in internet history, from people claiming to be psychology experts when they’re clearly not aware of anything related to the field to strange “chefs” making literal thirst traps for all kinds of food. However, some creators are genuinely talented people who care deeply about the kind of content that they’re putting out on the platform and are not entirely dependent on trends.
These creators keep coming up with various trends to keep their audiences enthralled. From lip-syncing battles and viral dance challenges to cooking trends and mocking dupe marketing, TikTok truly has it all. According to some forecasts and studies conducted, TikTok is supposed to see a total of 11.6% global growth in users in 2023. Approximately that’s about double the expected user growth of both Snapchat and Instagram.
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What is the “Turbulence” TikTok Trend?
Want to know more about the popular TikTok trend? Well, you’ve come to the right place. If you think the trend has anything to do with the turbulence caused in airplanes, then you couldn’t be more wrong. In the context of a flight, turbulence is the slight commotion or agitation caused due to chaotic changes in air pressure. But on TikTok, the term has a completely different meaning.
This trend involves men or people who possess male genitalia twisting their bodies in a sudden, jerky motion. The motion makes their genitalia slap against their thigh which makes a significantly audible noise. Thankfully, nothing explicit is ever shown in such videos. The way this trend is sweeping across TikTok is strange, to say the least, with younger audiences who seem to enjoy it in particular.
The trend originally started in 2021 when a user named “Just Jo” was seen in one of his videos “dancing” using these sudden movements. At one point in the video, he says that he is experiencing “a whole bunch of turbulence.” Fast forward two years later, this turned into the trend called “Turbulence.” Just Jo’s video went viral, and he’s now known as “the turbulence guy” on social media.
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Audience Reaction to the “Turbulence” Trend
The internet, as per usual, is divided when it comes to engaging in the trend. Some find it funny and think there is no harm in humoring the people doing the trend, while others are disturbed at why it became a trend in the first place.
One thing is absolutely true about TikTok, and it is the fact that the social media platform is rather good at inventing new words. The Turbulence trend is just another specimen of a TikTok user attaching an already existing word to a phenomenon that was always there, but nobody had an official term for it. This particular act in the question of male genitalia hitting the thigh of a man has existed for ages, but until Jo came around, people didn’t know what to call it.
Whether you like the trend or not, you have to be prepared to watch some more of it because it keeps gaining more popularity each passing day. What you can do is scroll away every time you see a person doing the trend and hope that the algorithm understands that you want nothing to do with this absurd trend.
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