How TikTok and Instagram hook Gen Z

Short-form video is the medium of our time. The average teenager will spend hours a day on TikTok and Instagram reels, which are the main sources of news and entertainment for the 18-24 demographic.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, administers the most important algorithm in the English-speaking world. He is undoubtedly as consequential as David Zaslav or Rupert Murdoch – the CEO of Warner Bros and the owner of News Corp – but his name rarely makes headlines.

On Mosseri’s Instagram, videos proven to hold users’ attention will be shown to more people. “Watch-time” is the basic currency of his algorithm. This has forced creators, many of whom earn a living on the platform, to abide by a golden formula: hook, secondary hook, payoff.

The algorithm has spawned an entire coaching industry in which aspiring influencers pay veteran creators for crash courses in perfecting the formula. Each course teaches more or less the same thing: promise the viewer an answer to a question, keep promising, then answer at the end. Better yet, don’t answer it – promise to answer it in the next video.

Where watch-time is the quantitative component of these algorithms, “trends” are the qualitative. If a particular word, image or sound appears to be trending among a certain data demographic, unrelated content will be algorithmically choked out of that demographic’s feed. This forces creators to cluster their content around proven trends.

A trend is never a story. It is always a concept or feeling that can be immediately communicated within three seconds, because it is generally understood that creators have only three seconds to hook users before they scroll away. As influential creator coach Dominik Rieger will often remark: “The viewer must immediately know ‘This is for me’.”

When Sean “Diddy” Combs trends, as he often does, it is never regarding a piece of evidence or a development in one of his trials. What is, on paper, a story about sexual coercion and exploitation of power is translated by the algorithm into a static portrait: a shame-faced Puff Daddy slick with baby oil. Searching “Diddy” will take you to a trove of baby oil related brainrot, and barely a single piece of factual reporting. Diddy’s actions did not create a story to be followed but a crude vignette to be gawked at.

When US president Donald Trump’s shocking birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was published by The Wall Street Journal, it did not become a major trend on TikTok or Instagram because the only way to parse the story was by reading the letter itself, which takes more than three seconds. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if an event’s essence cannot be compressed into a three-second span, it may as well have never happened. The proliferation of short-form video has created a media environment structurally hostile to sequential reasoning.

Young people’s attention is guided by an ever-narrowing algorithmic spotlight. Stories that are too big to be rendered by the spotlight are able to bask in pitch darkness and the people we allow to control the algorithms are not interested in changing that. In fact, Mosseri has been open about his efforts to speed up trends: “I want us to be better at trends. It takes still too long for things to pop on Instagram.”

The political implications of this media environment are clear. If short-form video platforms continue to transmute real-world events into less-than-superficial spectacles, the rich and powerful need not manually censor anything. If all chains of cause and effect have found their terminus in the platform algorithms, and if public consciousness is held inert by the same three-second hooks, what will be worth censoring?

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