Another day, another viral video of someone telling TikTok to help them find Sarah/Jessica/Amanda/whichever poor girl they overheard being bitched about by her friends. Except this time, one video seems to have crossed the line in the dirty laundry it aired, and now TikTok is divided on whether this trend of sharing mean comments about someone online is helpful, or just humiliating. Let’s dive in.
Kelly Yancy (@kelliekelshow) unwittingly started the debate when she made a (since-deleted) video asking TikTok to help her find “Sarah”, claiming she heard a group of girls sitting nearby bitching about a friend of that name.
“They said your coochie was out on the video, the way you was dressing, she said you dress sleazy everywhere the fuck you go,” Kelly said.
Sarah’s “coochie” being out was mentioned several times, with Kelly repeatedly saying that Sarah’s friends found her “uncomfortable” and “sleazy”.
The video, which you can still watch in stitches like this one, went viral quickly, as ones of this trend generally do. The women of TikTok rallied together and endlessly shared Kelly’s claims because, you know, everyone’s a girl’s girl who wants to help Sarah get away from a toxic friend group and love herself, right?
Or are things maybe a little more insidious than that?
Keara Sullivan (@superkeara) uploaded a video to TikTok playfully slamming the trend as traumatic for the person involved.
“I’m sorry but if I found out that my bestest (sic) friends were talking shit about me through a viral TikTok video, from a random girl who overheard them in public and then took it upon herself to air my shit out to millions of people with the express hope of that video finding me, and me finding out that my best friends actually hate me, I would immediately open my computer and I’d go to customink.com, and I would make a T-shirt with her face screen-printed on the front and the words ‘you did this’ written on the back,” she said.
“I would wait for my T-shirt to arrive and once it did, I would put it on, go to my nearest zoo, and throw myself into a pit of hungry lions or sharks.”
Okay, jokes aside though, Keara wrote in the video’s caption: “Like why would you ever think this kind of video is a good idea?”
It’s unclear which video Keara was referring to — the viral one about Sarah above, or a different one (because at this point, there’s a new one every week).
Either way, her comments have launched a debate on whether exposing a woman online for having shitty besties is an act of mercy, or damnation — especially if the video, like Sarah’s, refers to your vagina. Yikes.
“Imagine you’re just lalala scrolling your fyp on your lunch break or something [and] then boom, your social support system is a lie and 100,000 people found out first,” one person commented.
“This situation would actually devastate me,” wrote another.
A third person, referring to the video above about a bride’s bridesmaids bitching about her, said: “It was insane. ‘I hope it finds the bride’. That woman should be on her honeymoon. You want her to hear this NOW?!”
Others claimed Sarah was (allegedly) found, and revealed to be a doctor. Apparently she was very upset about the videos Kelly posted given their humiliating nature (and the jokes about her vagina).
Now, I haven’t been able to verify this given Kelly has since taken down all her videos about Sarah from TikTok, but that’s the context you need when understanding why people are so outraged that Sarah “had her business and name blasted on the internet for millions to see”.
“Honestly that second video [where Sarah was found] was outta pocket, [Kelly] kept saying ‘make sure you wear panties because that’s why they talkin’ about you’,” one person claimed.
“I would be upset about that video too, the girl (Kelly) keeps screaming over and over [while sharing] (Sarah’s) trauma,” said another.
However, not everyone agreed with this view: others claimed they’d want to know if their friends were bitching about them, whatever the cost.
“I would want to know so I can drop them and move on with life and not stay beside people who don’t like me,” one person wrote.
The sentiment was echoed by heaps of others who defended the trend and essentially implied that Sarah should have been grateful for Kelly looking out for her.
Honestly, I’m of the opinion that it depends on the situation: I’ve seen other videos that appear to genuinely come from a place of concern, and you can typically tell based on just how many awful comments the TikToker shares.
If the TikToker only vaguely outlines the cruel jabs someone’s nasty friends has made, and asks for help locating the woman in question so they can discuss it properly with HER (and not with the whole internet), then I’m inclined to believe it comes from a good place.
But a TikToker that shares the nasty comments in detail, which would not only humiliate the woman in question but also threaten her job and relationships with other people? Yeah, no thanks.
At that point, it’s probably doing more harm than good, and you have to wonder if at that point it’s worth sharing at all.
