This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Pitt chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.
A few weeks ago, I was in the evening lecture I TA for, as usual. I had just come off an especially hard week, but things were finally starting to look up. Suddenly, someone burst into the hall with his friends, a giant speaker in hand, and before any of us could do anything about the disruption, they were gone. About an hour later, a video recorded by the mysterious party had been uploaded to TikTok. It turns out that the leader of the group was a so-called “influencer” from another school who had recruited his friends to record everyone in the lecture hall during his “prank,” using a phone and their smart glasses. Aside from the fact that I was already weirded out by the idea that people can record you with their glasses without your knowledge, we discovered that I was visible in the video.
You wouldn’t recognize me unless you were really looking, but the knowledge that I had appeared was enough to undo all of the healing I’d done over the weekend in an instant, as I spiraled over what felt like a loss of control. Something I had feared would happen, as a Tower B dweller dodging Pitt’s newest influencer, had finally happened, just not in the way I expected. I was on the internet without my consent on an account I didn’t want to be associated with. I later found out that this wasn’t an isolated incident; friends in other classes had experienced the same thing and relayed that information to me with disdain. This chain of events and reactions got me thinking about whether or not I was overreacting, and why this was a problem in the first place.
When something clamps onto my mind as strongly as this has, the spirit of a STEM researcher possesses me, and I develop a deep need to collect and analyze data. So, I spent the past week polling just about every group I know on campus: my upperclassmen friends, students in the class I TA for, my residents, and even friends at other universities. All of these groups come from a variety of college experiences, but they all came to similar conclusions. Campus influencer culture was either something they had a deep hatred for, or simply something they didn’t care about. I’m aware enough to recognize that my samples might have some bias to them, but I polled a lot of people, and it struck me as odd that not a single person had something positive to say.
When I talk about campus influencers, I’m specifically referring to the more recent kind who do “pranks” in the name of content. Their content strays from the past pattern of influencers we’ve had on campus; if you’ve been at Pitt for a bit, you’ll remember when being an influencer consisted mainly of going somewhere and “romanticizing” it. This new style of content presents as disruptions like the one I experienced, ‘surprise dorm tours” where the influencer will walk right into a dorm room and start recording everything in sight, and candid interactions. Part of why these creators get popular could be the allure of novelty. I mean, how often is there someone on your campus who’s known for being an influencer? It’s like there’s a demand for microcelebrities, even if it’s generally accepted that they aren’t doing anything particularly noteworthy. Most of these videos seem innocuous when the only context you have for them is what you see on screen. When you’re only allowed to take things at face value, it becomes incredibly easy to separate the video from the reality it’s happening in.
However, this kind of behavior goes hand-in-hand with privacy and consent concerns. I’m someone who has very strict rules about being on camera. I will quickly turn people down if they ask me to be in a video unless I trust the person filming. Maybe that’s overkill, but that adverse feeling to being caught on camera is something that many students experience. Newer campus influencers are bold enough to record other people without asking, whether it be through creating disruptions in their classes or in their dorms. Uploading footage without permission opens students up to public scrutiny without their consent or knowledge. I’ve seen it happen firsthand: a student who was randomly focused on in the TikTok filmed during my lecture was subjected to hateful comments about his appearance without even agreeing to be in the video in the first place. It’s an exploitative behavior that continues because it fuels engagement. Students should be able to learn and live in comfort, without worrying about encountering someone trying to record them.
The worst part is that most of these videos are more of an annoyance than anything else. They’re not serious enough to warrant any immediate action, but just serious enough to make my responsibilities and general college experience harder. Worrying about something like this happening on top of navigating the stress of coursework, extracurriculars, and working with the largest Pitt freshman class to date has a way of making that ever-present overworked feeling rise to the surface. There are consequences that last past those 30 seconds an influencer posts online, and it often falls to students in positions like mine to pick up the pieces. Maybe this kind of content makes you laugh, and I’m glad that you have that. It used to make me laugh, too.