TikTok’s flip the camera trend: What it is and why people are upset

There’s a new trend on TikTok and everyone is hating it.

This is one of those trends that you might have heard about, not because you saw people using it, but because you saw people hating it – at least that’s how it was served to me on a platter of hate.

The trend goes like this: A group of people, especially children, give their phone to someone else and ask them to record themselves dancing. They record the dance on a front-facing camera so that the dancers can see themselves and at the end of the dance, they move towards the camera and turn it so that the person recording them can be seen.

According to Know Your Meme, the trend is a few weeks old, stating that it likely started with a video from TikTok creator @jaycrudddy in late October. The video has received 1.3 million views.

This may seem like a silly trend with ineffective results, but many people online are labeling it as bullying because the person chosen to record is often the person the dancing kids try to make fun of, whether it’s a less popular child, a person struggling with homelessness, or an elderly person. The punchline of the video is almost always at the recorder’s expense.

In an Instagram post about the trend, user @coquettesvanilla, who has over 41,400 followers, said the trend has “turned straight into bullying” and said the trend may seem small but is leaving people feeling “unsafe” and “like they’re not good enough.”

@coquettesvanilla wrote, “We shouldn’t make this whole trend of tearing someone down.” “Bullying isn’t always loud or obvious, sometimes it’s hidden behind ‘it’s just for fun.'” But if someone gets hurt, it’s not fun to begin with. We can choose to be better. We can choose not to amplify the negativity or make people feel embarrassed by us. Social media isn’t a place where people laugh, it can be a place where we actually respect each other.

Other users echoed @coquettesvanilla’s sentiment.

@hhyy1037, a user with 14,400 followers on TikTok, called the trend “disgusting.”

“Nine times out of 10, that person seems like the sweetest, kindest, most innocent human being. You can tell they were just trying to be nice, maybe cool, maybe introverted, maybe not even really a part of that friend group,” @hhyy1037 said.

Even @Tinx, a creator with 1.5 million followers on TikTok, made a video about the trend, calling it bullying.

Tinx said, “I’m not a mother, but if I found out my kids did this, I would kick them out of the house forever. I’m serious and I think this is one of the meanest—it’s not even mean, it’s cruel.” “This is straight up cruelty. This is very mean.”