Do you feel like you are in control of your life, or do you feel like shopping is running you?

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and UnBossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

So I love TikTok, but lately it kind of feels like the vibes are off.

What I've always liked about TikTok was that it feels like watching kind of user-generated Netflix,

regular people telling interesting stories or doing interesting things in ways

that feel genuinely captivating. As opposed to Instagram, where eventually, for me, it kind of

came to feel like, you know, good-looking people, pretty polished people selling me something.

Like, those are the people that I felt like were taking up the most space on Instagram.

Comparatively, on TikTok, it didn't feel like I had to wade through a ton of

intrusive ads to use the platform.

When you did encounter an ad, it just said sponsored at the bottom.

You swiped up, and that was that.

But lately, I feel that that has changed.

Now, you scroll alongside regular ads, but near those, you also get

these TikToks that look kind of like normal TikToks, but they say eligible for commission on the bottom.

They're not exactly ads ads, but the person in them who was talking to you like a friend does just happen to be

telling you about a product that they

maybe get a cut on if you pull the trigger on buying. Ticktoker Grace Brousel recently called out

how dystopian this all feels saying TikTok feels like Cheyenne and Ali Express had a baby. There's

links everywhere. There's 100 ads. Why is there a 17-year-old girl trying to sell me

35-cent ringlights? Now, none of this is entirely new. There was always stuff to be bought and

...