Is it ever okay to film strangers in public?

Nobody wants to be filmed without their knowledge. Why does it make up so much of the content we watch?

The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on. The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s Instagram account.

“It made me look like a creep,” he tells me. The video was an extreme example of a trend where women secretly film men’s reactions to them, often in the gym or in public spaces, either to shame the men for being inappropriate or to highlight the power of their own beauty — in Clark’s case, arguably both. But this time it caused an uproar: After Clark made a video about how uncomfortable he felt, other accounts reposted and responded to it, highlighting the ways in which public filming culture had gotten out of control. (Vox was unable to reach the model for comment.)

It’s been a decade and a half since social media made it possible for anyone’s camera phone video to go viral. But it’s TikTok, a platform where overnight fame is more achievable than ever, that has turned filming strangers in public into a controversial cottage industry. While influencers on Vine, YouTube, and Instagram have long used passersby as unwilling background actors to gain clout, TikTok has also allowed those people to offer their sides of the story and actually get heard. This is, in part, because of editing tools like stitching or dueting, and also because you don’t necessarily need to have a large account in order to go viral on the app. Viewers are invested in watching all sides of the drama unfold.

Thanks to these responses and a handful of watchdog accounts, a major backlash against public filming has been brewing: Outlets from the Guardian to The Verge to Vice have issued pleas to quit filming strangers, while BuzzFeed christened the unsettling genre with an equally unsettling name: “panopticontent.” Ask pretty much anyone in the world if they’d like to have someone film them without their permission and post it on the internet, and it’s difficult to imagine a normal person saying yes.

And yet, these videos continue to rack up millions of views, forcing us to reckon with the fact that in 2024, some of the most-viewed content on social media is essentially nonconsensual voyeurism. There’s clearly an appetite to watch as strangers are shamed, ridiculed, gawked, or generally caught off-guard, even when we know it isn’t exactly morally sound. A precursor to the form came in 2009: The blog People of Walmart was devoted to making fun of customers wearing embarrassing clothing (unsurprisingly, much of the humor relied on classist, fatphobic, and transphobic stereotypes). Instagram wrought the rise of many more of these types of accounts, like Subway Creatures, with nearly 3 million followers, which collects images of bizarre-seeming people and circumstances on the New York City subway; Passenger Shaming, for videos of plane freakouts and other bad airport behavior; or Influencers in the Wild, which has more than 5 million followers and invites people to laugh at those who dare film themselves in public. Its website encourages viewers to submit videos by promising “Your clip could be seen by millions!” The irony that it’s objectively worse to sneakily take a photo of someone else taking a photo of themselves comes secondary to the main goal: driving engagement by laughing at people who don’t know they’re being filmed.

Even supposedly wholesome content has fallen into the same trap. In 2018, an influencer posted an Instagram Story saga about a potential romance budding between two people on a plane seated in front of her, then later had to apologize when the woman felt that her privacy had been violated. The “Plane Bae” story went massively viral before anyone questioned whether what they were watching was exactly ethical.

It would be easier if we all collectively decided that it was never acceptable to film random strangers in public, under any circumstances. But rarely are social questions, especially ones that collide squarely with the ever-evolving norms of our online lives, this uncomplicated. You do, in fact, have the right to film in public places; as the ACLU points out, the ability to do so “creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, one that is free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory.”

This is especially important when filming the police or recording an encounter that could become violent: The video of George Floyd being murdered, for instance, was crucial in sparking the wave of protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020. Camera phone videos depicting racism and harassment, particularly during and after the lockdown period, have also opened important conversations about acceptable behavior in a uniquely distressing time.

Do arguments about First Amendment rights and social justice really apply to people who make strangers uncomfortable for engagement on TikTok? That depends on who you ask. Most will say they’re simply trying to “spread love” or that they never expected the content to go viral, while refusing to ask themselves tougher questions. It’s not difficult to imagine, for instance, someone being concerned about their digital privacy for more serious reasons, such as avoiding a stalker. One woman who was filmed being approached for a high-five by a dancer in Times Square and then began crying was both mocked for her reaction and accused of being racist because the dancer was Black. Her sister then made a video explaining that she was autistic and has contamination OCD, and therefore doesn’t like being touched. Another woman was falsely maligned for riding the subway with monkeypox after someone made a TikTok of her, but the reason for the bumps on her skin was actually due to a genetic condition.

There’s little legal recourse for people who find themselves unknowingly caught on camera. As Derigan Silver, chair of the University of Denver’s media, film, and journalism department, explains, a successful defamation case requires proving that the material contains a “false statement of fact” — but a video tends to show events as they happened, even if divorced from crucial context.

Clark is hoping to get the help of a lawyer to get the original video taken down, but he’s aware that that’s likely as far as it will go. “It sucks that we’re so far behind with our legal system that not more can be done about this right now. But it’s real, and it’s getting worse,” he says of the scourge of content creators who use strangers as background props.

The idea that privacy laws should evolve to incorporate situations like Clark’s, however, could be a dangerous one. “We want the ability to record things in public and to document them because it supports very important First Amendment ideals,” says Silver. “The flip side of that is not everybody is doing this with good motives.” Silver notes that where the law could catch up is by differentiating between newsworthy and non-newsworthy events — say, an encounter with police versus recording an anonymous Target employee — and making it harder to prosecute people who film matters of public consequence. In a paper on what she coined “forced faming,” British intellectual property law scholar Hayleigh Bosher also points out how the legal system must contend with the rise in deepfake content, which creates real-seeming content out of unwilling people’s likenesses.

No law can solve the problem of people being assholes on social media, but there are other ways to influence people’s behavior online. “There’s the law, there’s technology, there are cultural norms, and there’s the market,” explains Silver. “We can exert pressure on platforms and say, ‘Stop monetizing these accounts.’ Or they could write technology that makes it more difficult to upload material that violates someone’s privacy. Or we could have people online saying, ‘I’m going to stop watching this stuff.’”

Right now, it’s the cultural norms that are shifting most quickly: This moment has given rise to a number of accounts that call out public filming, like Joey Swoll, with his 7.7 million TikTok followers (his was one of the accounts that drew attention to Clark’s case). YouTubers like Kurtis Conner, meanwhile, have made videos calling for the end of filming strangers.

But there’s hypocrisy at play here too. Swoll’s account ostensibly exists to maintain a certain ideal of gym culture, but the majority of his content is dedicated to shaming (usually) women’s behavior — even influencers who are innocuously filming themselves without involving anyone else. Some of the instances he calls out are indeed objectively horrible, like the woman who pretended to take a video of herself in order to mock the man exercising behind her, but others are more cringeworthy than anything else, like the girl who did a TikTok dance in front of someone using a bench press.

Swoll also seems to have a special interest in objecting to women who claim that certain men at gyms make them feel uncomfortable, and then film the alleged “creep.” These examples aren’t always black-and-white: The evidence of the alleged harassment or creepy behavior isn’t always clear from the videos, but never does Swoll allow for any interrogation or curiosity about what might have occurred off-camera. Instead, he’s positioned himself as the head vigilante of the digital Wild West, shaming surreptitious gym recorders by bringing greater attention to them — ironically, the very same thing the women appear to be doing with the “creeps” they film. The fact that both Swoll and Influencers in the Wild tend to have millions more followers than the people they’re criticizing also adds another layer: When is calling out those who film strangers creating a barrage of attention on bystanders who never wished to be dragged into the public eye in the first place? (Swoll did not respond to a request for comment.)

The thirst for voyeurism content — whether you’re watching a stranger unknowingly get filmed or watching someone scold a stranger for doing the filming — means that accounts who engage in it have a higher likelihood of going viral and scoring lucrative brand deals. Influencers in the Wild, for instance, has its own merch and board game, while Joey Swoll regularly promotes his brand of low-calorie sauces. Knowing that the demand for “panopticontent” is so high leads creators to produce more of it — often by using TikTok’s stitch or duet feature, which allows them to milk as much clout as they can from a single trending topic or video — whether or not they realize it’s ethically murky.

Faced with questions like, “Is it worth it to pull my phone out right now?” or “Am I a shitty person if I film someone without their knowledge?” Silver recommends resorting to the golden rule. We’re already being recorded all the time — by security cameras, by our phones, which track not only our location but every keystroke we make online, and by other people’s cameras — but we’re the ones who decide whether or not to post our own videos online. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram could theoretically step in to demonetize accounts that make money from non-consensual voyeurism, but this is almost an unimaginable scenario, in part because it feels impossible to enforce. Until then, it’s up to audiences to shift cultural norms around what’s acceptable behavior online and what isn’t, but given the astonishing popularity of these videos, that doesn’t seem all that likely.

After the incident at Target, Clark’s first thought was that he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. “Working in retail, you get used to people harassing you. I’m not seen as a person anymore, I’m seen as an object,” he tells me. Increasingly, this is how people on social media view each other: as NPCs, disposable, as background actors with no desires or interests of their own. While TikTok has allowed Clark to respond publicly and have thousands of people rallying behind him, it’s also responsible for helping to create the problem in the first place. “There’s a lack of decency, and I think it may be the allure of getting famous and going viral. People think that justifies the means, but it definitely does not.”