TikTok’s ‘Soft White Underbelly’ is being called ‘exploitative’

In each edition of web_crawlr we have exclusive original content every day. On Tuesdays our IRL Reporter Tricia Crimmins breaks down the trends on the popular app that will make you cringe in her “Problematic on TikTok” column.  If you want to read columns like this before everyone else, subscribe to web_crawlr to get your daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.

Last year, I wrote a story on how unhoused people are sharing their daily lives and circumstances on TikTok. My reporting led me to Invisible People, a nonprofit that produces daily journalism by and about homeless and formerly homeless people. The nonprofit is run by Mark Horvath, who used to be homeless himself, and he told the Daily Dot that people who are struggling financially and may be without a home tell their stories for two reasons: Because doing so gives them a sense of agency and so people will help them. 

Those two reasons seem to be behind Soft White Underbelly (@softwhiteunderbelly), a TikTok channel that posts short documentary-style clips of struggling individuals. The account is run by Mark Laita, a former commercial photographer that began filming people telling their stories to create “portraits of the human condition,” as described in the account’s bio. Laita has almost 70,000 followers on TikTok.

Each individual featured in Soft White Underbelly interviews seems to be a part of a communityor engage in an industry that is highly stigmatized; recent interviewees have been an opiate addict, a sex worker, and the child of a woman with dissociative identity disorder. Many have also been unhoused people. 

And Laita’s project has financially helped some of its subjects. The Washington Postreported that a GoFundMe amassed over $28,000 from Laita’s followers for a subject one of of his videos that described her experience as a victim of childhood sexual abuse. 

Many people have heralded Laita for his interviews—comments under a recent video of his urge him to “keep up the good work” and thank him for helping his subjects share their stories. But others aren’t convinced that his work is for good at all.

In a recent video, Bob the Drag Queen said that Laita’s account is “one of the most problematic channels on the internet” and “insanely exploitative.”

And his comments resonated with a lot of people familiar with Soft White Underbelly videos: Some said that Laita seemed judgmental in the way in which he interviewed his subjects, others said filming people sharing their story without helping them is cruel. 

The biggest critique of Laita, though, is that he is making videos of others in order to amass fame himself.

Why it matters

There is undeniable value in helping people tell their stories to the wider public if they want to. And if doing so allows them to get needed financial support, that’s a huge plus. But be aware of the potential that the people you follow could be using the plights of others to platform themselves.

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