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Is it ever okay to film strangers in public?

vox.com

Getty Images Nobody wants to be filmed without their knowledge. Why does it make up so much of the content we watch? The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on. The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s Instagram account. “It made me look like a creep,” he tells me. The video was an extreme example of a trend where women secretly film men’s reactions to them, often in the gym or in public spaces, either to shame the men for being inappropriate or to highlight the power of their own beauty — in Clark’s case, arguably both. But this time it caused an uproar: After Clark made a video about how uncomfortable he felt, other accounts reposted and responded to it, highlighting the ways in which public filming culture had gotten out of control. (Vox was unable to reach the model for comment.) @mitchelliguesss ♬ original sound - mitchell It’s been a decade and a half since social media made it possible for anyone’s camera phone video to go viral. But it’s TikTok, a platform where overnight fame is more achievable than ever, that has turned filming strangers in public into a controversial cottage industry. While influencers on Vine, YouTube, and Instagram have long used passersby as unwilling background actors to gain clout, TikTok has also allowed those people to offer their sides of the story and actually get heard. This is, in part, because of editing tools like stitching or dueting, and also because you don’t necessarily need to have a large account in order to go viral on the app. Viewers are invested in watching all sides of the drama unfold. Thanks to these responses and a handful of watchdog accounts, a major backlash against public filming has been brewing: Outlets from the Guardian to The Verge to Vice have issued pleas to quit filming strangers, while BuzzFeed christened the unsettling genre with an equally unsettling name: “panopticontent.” Ask pretty much anyone in the world if they’d like to have someone film them without their permission and post it on the internet, and it’s difficult to imagine a normal person saying yes. And yet, these videos continue to rack up millions of views, forcing us to reckon with the fact that in 2024, some of the most-viewed content on social media is essentially nonconsensual voyeurism. There’s clearly an appetite to watch as strangers are shamed, ridiculed, gawked, or generally caught off-guard, even when we know it isn’t exactly morally sound. A precursor to the form came in 2009: The blog People of Walmart was devoted to making fun of customers wearing embarrassing clothing (unsurprisingly, much of the humor relied on classist, fatphobic, and transphobic stereotypes). Instagram wrought the rise of many more of these types of accounts, like Subway Creatures, with nearly 3 million followers, which collects images of bizarre-seeming people and circumstances on the New York City subway; Passenger Shaming, for videos of plane freakouts and other bad airport behavior; or Influencers in the Wild, which has more than 5 million followers and invites people to laugh at those who dare film themselves in public. Its website encourages viewers to submit videos by promising “Your clip could be seen by millions!” The irony that it’s objectively worse to sneakily take a photo of someone else taking a photo of themselves comes secondary to the main goal: driving engagement by laughing at people who don’t know they’re being filmed. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Influencers in the Wild (@influencersinthewild) Even supposedly wholesome content has fallen into the same trap. In 2018, an influencer posted an Instagram Story saga about a potential romance budding between two people on a plane seated in front of her, then later had to apologize when the woman felt that her privacy had been violated. The “Plane Bae” story went massively viral before anyone questioned whether what they were watching was exactly ethical. It would be easier if we all collectively decided that it was never acceptable to film random strangers in public, under any circumstances. But rarely are social questions, especially ones that collide squarely with the ever-evolving norms of our online lives, this uncomplicated. You do, in fact, have the right to film in public places; as the ACLU points out, the ability to do so “creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, one that is free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory.” This is especially important when filming the police or recording an encounter that could become violent: The video of George Floyd being murdered, for instance, was crucial in sparking the wave of protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020. Camera phone videos depicting racism and harassment, particularly during and after the lockdown period, have also opened important conversations about acceptable behavior in a uniquely distressing time. Do arguments about First Amendment rights and social justice really apply to people who make strangers uncomfortable for engagement on TikTok? That depends on who you ask. Most will say they’re simply trying to “spread love” or that they never expected the content to go viral, while refusing to ask themselves tougher questions. It’s not difficult to imagine, for instance, someone being concerned about their digital privacy for more serious reasons, such as avoiding a stalker. One woman who was filmed being approached for a high-five by a dancer in Times Square and then began crying was both mocked for her reaction and accused of being racist because the dancer was Black. Her sister then made a video explaining that she was autistic and has contamination OCD, and therefore doesn’t like being touched. Another woman was falsely maligned for riding the subway with monkeypox after someone made a TikTok of her, but the reason for the bumps on her skin was actually due to a genetic condition. There’s little legal recourse for people who find themselves unknowingly caught on camera. As Derigan Silver, chair of the University of Denver’s media, film, and journalism department, explains, a successful defamation case requires proving that the material contains a “false statement of fact” — but a video tends to show events as they happened, even if divorced from crucial context. Clark is hoping to get the help of a lawyer to get the original video taken down, but he’s aware that that’s likely as far as it will go. “It sucks that we’re so far behind with our legal system that not more can be done about this right now. But it’s real, and it’s getting worse,” he says of the scourge of content creators who use strangers as background props. The idea that privacy laws should evolve to incorporate situations like Clark’s, however, could be a dangerous one. “We want the ability to record things in public and to document them because it supports very important First Amendment ideals,” says Silver. “The flip side of that is not everybody is doing this with good motives.” Silver notes that where the law could catch up is by differentiating between newsworthy and non-newsworthy events — say, an encounter with police versus recording an anonymous Target employee — and making it harder to prosecute people who film matters of public consequence. In a paper on what she coined “forced faming,” British intellectual property law scholar Hayleigh Bosher also points out how the legal system must contend with the rise in deepfake content, which creates real-seeming content out of unwilling people’s likenesses. No law can solve the problem of people being assholes on social media, but there are other ways to influence people’s behavior online. “There’s the law, there’s technology, there are cultural norms, and there’s the market,” explains Silver. “We can exert pressure on platforms and say, ‘Stop monetizing these accounts.’ Or they could write technology that makes it more difficult to upload material that violates someone’s privacy. Or we could have people online saying, ‘I’m going to stop watching this stuff.’” Right now, it’s the cultural norms that are shifting most quickly: This moment has given rise to a number of accounts that call out public filming, like Joey Swoll, with his 7.7 million TikTok followers (his was one of the accounts that drew attention to Clark’s case). YouTubers like Kurtis Conner, meanwhile, have made videos calling for the end of filming strangers. But there’s hypocrisy at play here too. Swoll’s account ostensibly exists to maintain a certain ideal of gym culture, but the majority of his content is dedicated to shaming (usually) women’s behavior — even influencers who are innocuously filming themselves without involving anyone else. Some of the instances he calls out are indeed objectively horrible, like the woman who pretended to take a video of herself in order to mock the man exercising behind her, but others are more cringeworthy than anything else, like the girl who did a TikTok dance in front of someone using a bench press. @thejoeyswoll He is NOT staring at you or even looking at you! This gym needs to kick you out NOW! #gymtok #gym #fyp ♬ Funny video "Carmen Prelude" Arranging weakness(836530) - yo suzuki(akisai) Swoll also seems to have a special interest in objecting to women who claim that certain men at gyms make them feel uncomfortable, and then film the alleged “creep.” These examples aren’t always black-and-white: The evidence of the alleged harassment or creepy behavior isn’t always clear from the videos, but never does Swoll allow for any interrogation or curiosity about what might have occurred off-camera. Instead, he’s positioned himself as the head vigilante of the digital Wild West, shaming surreptitious gym recorders by bringing greater attention to them — ironically, the very same thing the women appear to be doing with the “creeps” they film. The fact that both Swoll and Influencers in the Wild tend to have millions more followers than the people they’re criticizing also adds another layer: When is calling out those who film strangers creating a barrage of attention on bystanders who never wished to be dragged into the public eye in the first place? (Swoll did not respond to a request for comment.) The thirst for voyeurism content — whether you’re watching a stranger unknowingly get filmed or watching someone scold a stranger for doing the filming — means that accounts who engage in it have a higher likelihood of going viral and scoring lucrative brand deals. Influencers in the Wild, for instance, has its own merch and board game, while Joey Swoll regularly promotes his brand of low-calorie sauces. Knowing that the demand for “panopticontent” is so high leads creators to produce more of it — often by using TikTok’s stitch or duet feature, which allows them to milk as much clout as they can from a single trending topic or video — whether or not they realize it’s ethically murky. Faced with questions like, “Is it worth it to pull my phone out right now?” or “Am I a shitty person if I film someone without their knowledge?” Silver recommends resorting to the golden rule. We’re already being recorded all the time — by security cameras, by our phones, which track not only our location but every keystroke we make online, and by other people’s cameras — but we’re the ones who decide whether or not to post our own videos online. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram could theoretically step in to demonetize accounts that make money from non-consensual voyeurism, but this is almost an unimaginable scenario, in part because it feels impossible to enforce. Until then, it’s up to audiences to shift cultural norms around what’s acceptable behavior online and what isn’t, but given the astonishing popularity of these videos, that doesn’t seem all that likely. After the incident at Target, Clark’s first thought was that he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. “Working in retail, you get used to people harassing you. I’m not seen as a person anymore, I’m seen as an object,” he tells me. Increasingly, this is how people on social media view each other: as NPCs, disposable, as background actors with no desires or interests of their own. While TikTok has allowed Clark to respond publicly and have thousands of people rallying behind him, it’s also responsible for helping to create the problem in the first place. “There’s a lack of decency, and I think it may be the allure of getting famous and going viral. People think that justifies the means, but it definitely does not.”

Why are Americans spending so much?

2 d

vox.com

Shoppers carry Uniqlo bags in the SoHo neighborhood of New York on March 8, 2024. | John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images They say the economy is bad, but they’re spending like it’s booming. Americans have been pessimistic about the economy for years. Weirdly, that’s seemed to have little impact on their willingness to open their wallets. Retail sales surged during the pandemic as home-bound workers clicked “complete purchase” on everything from Pelotons to sourdough starter. In 2020, e-commerce sales rose by 43 percent. Stimulus checks gave Americans newfound savings and excess money to burn. Supply chains couldn’t keep up with the demand. That was all supposed to come crashing down at some point. For more than a year, economists warned about the “death of the consumer” and a resulting recession — neither of which have materialized. Consumers were expected to retreat as inflation skyrocketed, hitting a 9.1 percent peak in June 2022 and remaining stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. Instead, Americans just kept buying more, even accounting for price increases and beyond growth in their disposable income. Their spending helped drive US economic growth in 2023 and remained high in the first months of this year. In March, consumer spending increased by 0.8 percent, exceeding expectations from financial analysts. There is a sign that Americans’ shopping spree might be finally coming to an end: Retail spending stayed the same in April as compared to the previous month, falling short of analyst projections for growth. However, those numbers don’t capture spending on services — for example, health care, transportation, and insurance — which has increased markedly this year. And both Preston Caldwell, a senior US economist at Morningstar, and Scott Hoyt, a Moody’s Analytics economist, said those numbers could easily bounce back next month, even if they’re expecting spending to cool by the end of the year. “I am anticipating that we do see eventually a consumer slowdown over the course of this year,” Caldwell said. “It’s premature to say that that’s already playing out right now.” Indeed, spending is bound to come down at some point under the pressure of high interest rates, which the Fed isn’t expected to cut until later this year — or potentially at all in 2024. So why, despite all the doom and gloom among consumers, has spending been so resilient? Who is driving high spending? Two things are simultaneously true: People feel really negatively about the economy, and that’s not stopping them from spending. In May, the University of Michigan recorded its lowest consumer sentiment reading in six months — an index of 67.4 out of 100 — as part of its long-running survey. That’s up from this time last year, but still well below pre-pandemic consumer sentiment readings, which hovered in the upper 80s and 90s. The trend in sentiment was widespread across demographic lines: Consumers “expressed worries that inflation, unemployment and interest rates may all be moving in an unfavorable direction in the year ahead,” the University of Michigan report reads. It’s hard to reconcile that with high spending figures. But in short, the rich currently feel rich and account for a large share of overall spending. The middle class feels a little better off too, and likely still has some savings built up they can burn through. They might not yet have felt the pressure of high interest rates and inflation to the same degree as people who rent and have fewer investments. (But that’s due to change.) High-income consumers — households in the top 20 percent of income earning at least $244,025 before taxes as of 2022 — have been largely cushioned from economic headwinds and are flush with cash to spend. The pandemic saw Americans’ average percentage of income saved increase to an all-time high of 32 percent in April 2020 after many households received stimulus checks. That has helped fuel spending, but unlike in other high-income countries where consumers have proved more thrifty, Americans are close to depleting those savings. “The excess savings [are] still kind of sloshing their way through the system. Depending on how you estimate excess savings, they will be depleted sometime in the middle of 2024 or maybe by as late as mid-2025,” Caldwell said. Many high-income consumers also locked in low interest rates on their mortgages before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in March 2022, and they’re seeing their home values continue to go up nonetheless. The average US home price increased from $287,000 in 2019 to $450,000 in 2024. This is in part due to persistent low inventory: High interest rates have kept would-be sellers on the sidelines because their mortgage payments would be higher if they bought a new place. High-income consumers have also seen their investment portfolios balloon in the last year. The stock market repeatedly tested new highs in recent months, with the latest record set on Thursday in the wake of new data showing that inflation is slowing. And wealthy older Americans who allocate more of their portfolios to government bonds are benefiting from higher interest rates. “That sort of gives consumers an incentive to spend out of their newfound wealth,” Hoyt said. “And since this set of consumers still has excess savings left over from the pandemic, that gives them the easy, relatively liquid monies to do so.” The question is how long the stock market can sustain this run. Some analysts think stocks are currently overpriced and due for a correction — which might cause some people to finally close their wallets. “Equity prices are starting to move more into arguably overvalued territory,” Caldwell said. “So that’s probably not going to be a tailwind [for spending] over the next year.” At the same time, the factors currently fueling spending at the highest income levels aren’t universal. Not all consumers can afford to spend more. Even though inflation has come down significantly from its 2022 peak, low-income Americans are struggling with higher prices. Consumers in general say they are budgeting more on everyday essentials like fresh produce and baby supplies. Among people living paycheck to paycheck, pandemic savings (if they ever really had any) might be long gone. Low and moderate-income consumers are also increasingly weighed down by credit card debt and struggling to pay it down due to high interest rates, which research suggests could be a major contributor to overall economic pessimism. Though credit card debt levels dipped during the pandemic, they are now returning to pre-pandemic levels, with the average balance per consumer increasing by 8.5 percent in the last year to $6,218. More than half of people earning less than $25,000 carry a balance on their credit cards. Their only consolation is that the job market remains strong, meaning they might be able to count on another paycheck — but even that might not last. Analysts including Caldwell expect the unemployment rate to rise from 3.8 percent to 3.9 percent and wage growth to slow in 2024. Ultimately, however, low-income consumers “just don’t account for that big of a share of total spending,” Hoyt said. “It’s the high end of the income distribution that accounts for a disproportionate share of the spending.”