Sludge content is consuming TikTok. Why aren't we talking about it?

Billy Oberman was using TikTok as a means to an end. Instead of looking for his own entertainment, the New Jersey musician had downloaded the app as a way to promote his content, only browsing occasionally. But fairly quickly, an odd thing happened.

Seemingly out of nowhere, his feed was choked by Stewie, Brian and Peter Griffin. Because quite by accident, and against his will, he'd fallen down what he calls the Family Guy "pipeline."

"You're watching it and you're not really taking it in — it's just something to stimulate you," he said. "It's like Cocomelon," a YouTube channel geared toward infants — but here, aimed at adults.

But what Oberman saw is just a small example of what the few people who have studied it are calling "sludge content."

And while it seems insidious, Oberman says it's an experience shared by many on the app: TikTok's video recommendation algorithm, which is supposed to deliver content based on your interests, relentlessly showing users clips packaged in a very particular, and overstimulating, way.

The types of videos that make up this experience are everywhere on the app, but it's unlikely non-users have seen anything like it. That's because the style of video that Oberman stumbled upon exists almost solely on TikTok, and only came into being in the last few years.

The "pipeline," as Oberman and others have dubbed it, is basically just segments from Seth MacFarlane's animated sitcom Family Guy reposted on TikTok — what Canadian YouTuber Savantics referred to as "the new age of piracy: Family Guy episodes being posted in several parts, with soap-cutting underneath, by accounts run by bots."

Instead of playing alone, the segments sit on top of low-substance, high-interest videos. Sometimes they're recordings of mobile video games like Knife Jump or Subway Surfers. Other times they are ASMR "satisfying videos": short for "autonomous sensory meridian response" (these videos show creators squishing and cutting into various substances — like coloured bars of soap — to elicit that response). Sometimes the segments are combined with a third or even fourth video to create a jumbled mess of meaningless visual stimulation. 

"I will have a moment of clarity while I'm watching and be like, 'What am I doing?' Then I'll just continue to watch," said Oberman. "That's where we're at, technology and entertainment-wise."

But cartoon clips taking over feeds is only a symptom of a wider change in media creation and consumption that's altering the voices, and ideas, that gain audiences — all while going virtually unnoticed.

"This is an example of this larger trend of dumbed-down content, which is meant to be consumed passively rather than intelligently and actively," said Saif Shahin, an assistant professor of digital culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

"What TikTok is doing with these videos is allowing people to have distractions on the same screen ...  [and therefore] have people stay on the same screen for an extended period of time.

"This form of media content is not meant for active engagement," he added. "While it draws on people's already limited abilities to be attentive to media for extended periods of time, it then reinforces that and further limits people's attention spans."

The Family Guy phenomenon, specifically, has been recognized mostly due to a related meme and the odd fact that a cartoon more than two decades old gained newfound popularity.