Spend a few minutes in the comments section on TikTok or other social media platforms, and you’re bound to see a certain type of comment coming up again and again. Someone shares their personal experience, a recommendation or a recipe, and the replies are flooded with remarks like: “Well, what if I can’t eat/buy/wear/use/just don’t like that particular thing?”
TikTok creator Sarah Lockwood (@sarahthebookfairy) refers to the tendency to make everything we see online about ourselves as the “What About Me Effect.” She posted a video about the concept in September 2023; it has since been viewed more than 6 million times.
As Lockwood explains in the video, the What About Me Effect is “when someone sees something that doesn’t really pertain to them, or they can’t fully relate to, and they find a way to make it about them — or try to seek out certain accommodations for their very nuanced, personalized situation, instead of recognizing that maybe they’re just not the target audience for that thing.”
Lockwood said she’s been noticing this kind of online behavior for a few years now.
“Ever since I started creating my own content and receiving those types of comments, it made it more obvious to me when I saw it on other videos,” she told HuffPost in an email.
