Before losing most of her inheritance on TikTok, Cindi White wasn't very interested in social media.
White, a 65-year-old former insurance investigator who lives alone in Burlington County, New Jersey, spent the year she retired traveling — dining in Dubai, sipping cocktails by the sea in Montego Bay, Jamaica, or strolling among monks in Kathmandu, Nepal.
But in 2020, the pandemic halted her jet-setting lifestyle.
She'd suddenly found herself profoundly lonely. Most of her friends were from work, and her closest relatives, a brother and a nephew, lived over 80 miles away in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Her only real company was her cat, a green-eyed tabby named Bella. To pass the time, she spent months writing poetry and rap-inspired lyrics about feeling isolated from the rest of society.
Then, just as the world was opening up again, in March 2021, she ripped her rotator cuff while lifting heavy boxes — plunging her into further isolation as she recovered. That's when she downloaded TikTok and started watching the app's Live Matches.
Launched in 2020, Live Matches, colloquially known as 'TikTok Battles," is a fast-paced live-streaming format where creators compete against each other for likes and virtual gifts.
White was immediately enthralled.
The matches imitate a video game. Two TikTokers stream side-by-side, divided into "red" and "blue" teams. As a timer counts down from five minutes, they go to wild and kooky lengths to get their fans to send them these gifts. Many sing and dance, some beg, plead, or throw tantrums, and others cheer on their fans like rabid soccer moms.
Viewers purchase each TikTok gift — animated emojis of various creatures and symbols — on the platform's store. A "rose" costs just one cent. But high rollers can splurge $500 on a "TikTok universe" gift, which pops out a screen-encompassing spaceship that circles a sparkling globe while a short jingle about "uniqueness" and "teamwork" plays in the background. Each gift has a corresponding number of points depending on its cost. Fans can also 'like' an influencer's stream to boost their points, but it doesn't earn them nearly as much as gifts. The battler who receives the most points at the end of the match wins.
Top battlers on TikTok are rewarded with a place on the platform's Daily Ranking, a 99-person leaderboard made up of TikTok's highest-grossing livestreamers. These battlers rake in millions of dollars in spending from gifts, and top influencers in the US can amass as much as $328,000 in a day — though ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, keeps about half of these earnings for itself. The platform also rewards gifters with badges, ranking them from level one to 50 according to how much they spend.
In a nutshell, TikTok Battles are the largest popularity contests on the internet.
For White, the drama of it all was engrossing. Over the next year and a half, she devoted as much as 50 hours a week to TikTok Battles. She'd spend her nights in the darkness of her apartment, lit only by the blueish tinge of her phone screen, her fingers coiled like springs as she waited anxiously for her moment to strike. Then, seconds before a match ended, she'd hit her favorite creator with a $13 disco ball or a $29 Jet Ski — if she planned it right — just enough to push them over the edge and win.
The chats would erupt into a frenzy, and the streamer and their fans would shower her with praise. "It's like somebody on TV calling out your name, especially if there's over a thousand people in the room," White said. "It really does do something to you. You feel like you're somebody."
White was burning as much as $100 a day at her peak. By May 2023, she had spent more than $25,000, according to transaction records and bank statements reviewed by BI. "I was struggling to pay my bills," she said.
What started as a bit of fun, she realized, had morphed into something resembling an addiction.
Like a video game
Social-media companies have, in recent years, been accused of creating deliberately addicting products. In 2020, Tim Kendall, the former director of monetization for Facebook, now Meta, testified in Congress that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook," setting out to make products such as Facebook addictive from its start. In November, a federal judge rejected a plea by several social-media companies, including TikTok, to throw out hundreds of lawsuits that accused them of encouraging addiction in millions of children. Some studies suggest that TikTok is especially addictive, with an algorithm engineered to serve increasingly alluring content and lose users in endless short-form videos.
The longer a platform can keep you scrolling, the more advertisements it can serve up, which is the primary way social-media companies make money. But Battles push TikTok further. Instead of monetizing peoples' attention spans to show more advertisements, it's designed to make users spend money — sometimes lavishly — directly on the platform.
Researchers who spoke to BI said TikTok Battles are unlike anything they've previously seen on social media. While other platforms such as Twitch and OnlyFans allow users to send their favorite streamers money, TikTok Battles is unique in featuring influencers in a video-game-like competition for whose fans can tip them the most.
These matches lean onusers' competitiveness and entice them to tip influencers through gamified design elements to keep them hooked — a design strategy known as "monetized rivalries." Fans also have to exchange their real dollars for tokens called Coins before buying gifts — a process designers call "microtransactions" — which helps people forget how much they spend.
These design strategies, collectively referred to as "dark patterns," because of their potential to manipulate user behavior, pair with the power of parasocial relationships that viewers develop with influencers, who also encourage their fans to spend generously.
BI spoke to more than 15 battle participants, influencers, and their gifters, where fans described feeling addicted to gifting and suggested it was a source of financial struggles for them. Reddit, Twitter, and even TikTok users discuss their obsession with Battles. In videos and memes, many confess to having spent their entire incomes on these virtual gifts, going into debt, or struggling with their bills. The comment sections of these posts are littered with commiserating gifters who also admit to their out-of-control spending behavior.
Natasha Schull, an NYU cultural-anthropology professor who studies addiction in gambling, said users who gift TikTok battlers feel the same "potent" mix of anticipation and uncertainty gamblers feel when betting on an event.
"It's almost like they are horses and you are betting on them, right? And you're participating in the action," Schull said. "You can watch the faces of these people, their gratitude, their excitement — and you feel like you're a part of that, even if you've just gifted some tiny little thing to them."
White agreed with comparing her compulsive spending to that of a gambler. "It does exactly what gambling does," she said. "But you don't get anything in return."
It does exactly what gambling does. But you don't get anything in return.
In a statement to BI, TikTok emphasized that Live Matches never require viewers to give gifts to participate. The company clarified that Matches are not designed to resemble gambling and shared its gambling-support resources available in the community-support section of its website. TikTok also prohibits influencers from requesting gifts by violating the company's hate-speech policy, exploiting ongoing tragedies, disseminating misinformation, or soliciting gifts in exchange for items or services.
"We have firm guardrails to protect our LIVE community, including specific policies for Match content, customizable safety tools for viewers, and only allowing people over 18 to send gifts," a spokesperson from the company said.
How to Level Up
White felt a rush every time she helped her favorite TikToker win a battle. It was like being a part of a winning team. "They would always say, 'Oh, Cindi, you know, we wouldn't have won without you,'" she said.
Thomas Mildner, a researcher with the Digital Media Lab at the University of Bremen in Germany, said enticing users to spend money through competition is one of the primary dark patterns used in TikTok Battles. These "monetized rivalries" can be found in two forms: Through TikTok's Daily Ranking system and through the badges it gives gifters for how much they've spent.
TikTok's Daily Rankings, many gifters said, incentivized them to spend generously on their favorite influencers because they want to see them rank highly on the leaderboard — the same way one might want to see their favorite football team advance in a league. But TikTok Battles aren't skills-based games. Instead, winning is tied to how much money a battler's fans spend.
A TikTok spokesperson said Battles aren't the only way influencers can make it onto the Daily Ranking leaderboard. Participating in TikTok's karaoke competition "Gimme the Mic" or receiving gifts during a regular livestream could also earn them enough points. But a majority of the top influencers on the platform's Daily Ranking, reviewed by BI, are those who battle.
Generous gifters can also be identified by their badge level. While fans can see how much they must spend to reach their next badge, TikTok doesn't officially share how much money users need to pay to reach every rank. But dedicated fans have crowdsourced tables, shared throughout the site, to estimate the required spending for each level.
According to those tables, you only have to purchase about one cent to a dollar's worth of gifts to receive the first nine badges. However, the cost of ascension increases over time, eventually peaking at about $848,000 in spending for a level 50 badge. BI cross-referenced those figures with screenshots made available by gifters through TikTok and figures and screenshots several interviewees shared directly with BI. ByteDance declined BI's request to fact-check or receive official statistics.
Mildner views this system as a "clear-cut" dark pattern because advancing through levels in the early stages of gifting doesn't require much spending but slowly balloons into requiring egregious amounts of cash. "You can incentivize certain actions where users don't realize the road they're going down because it's chopped up into small decisions," he said.
These levels also unlock perks. TikTok announces when high-level gifters enter livestreams and features their messages prominently in chats, distinguishing them from lower-ranking gifters. They're also allowed to purchase more exclusive gifts, such as the "thunder falcon," a soaring, screeching white bird only available to level 43 gifters and above, which requires approximately $188,000 worth of spending according to the crowdsourced tables.
Laurie Garcia, a 54-year-old level-40 gifter from Denver, said she views her badge as a status symbol. "That's how people recognize you, by your gifting level on TikTok," Garcia said. Her high gifter level allows her to gain the recognition of her favorite TikTokers. "It's like living in Beverly Hills. It's like driving a Rolls-Royce," she said. Though Garcia admitted gifting during TikTok Battles could be very addicting, she felt she spent within her means and that it was worth the money. "I get entertainment out of it," she added. "I pay for my entertainment, basically."
Once the app ensnares you into coming back and spending money, "microtransactions," with TikTok's in-app currency help users lose track of how much they've spent.
"You start spending an almost fictive currency that you don't care about as much," Mildner said. It's hard for the human brain to recognize that they're spending around $300 on a "Lion" gift when it's listed as costing 29,999 TikTok coins. He added that you "completely cut that link." In comparison, OnlyFans, another popular platform where users can tip creators, lets people send tips in dollars without exchanging them into an app-specific token.
ByteDance declined BI's request to provide an exact currency conversion between US dollars and the app's Coins, stating the purchase price varies based on where it is sold, currency, promotions, sales, and discounts. Coins are also marked up by approximately 25% in the app versus on TikTok's website. The company also did not comment on "microtransactions" potentially hindering users from understanding how much they've actually spent.
Destanie Hess, a 45-year-old former marketing executive from Philadelphia who supports herself and her daughter with a $2,100 a month disability check, said she routinely spent over her limit by making several microtransactions in the heat of a battle. "It's a click of two buttons on your phone," Hess told Insider. "You can buy it in under 30 seconds while you're still in and spend it immediately."
Hess hated seeing her favorite creator lose but would immediately regret how much she spent. "After I do it, I'm thinking: 'Here I am on disability. This guy is making thousands a month. What am I doing?'"
White also suggested microtransactions made it easy for her to forget how much she was spending. "I wouldn't even think about it," she said. "I would just think about the content of the gifts."
While lawmakers are catching up with manipulative design tactics in applications and websites — California recently banned some dark patterns in an update to the state's digital-privacy legislation — the regulatory framework overseeing how companies use such elements is still limited.
Greg Dickinson, a professor from St. Thomas University's College of Law in Miami, said it's easier to regulate firms that use dark patterns to create obstacles to unsubscribing from a service — similar to how the popular diet app Noom settled a $56 million lawsuit for doing just that. Still, regulating design choices that encourage specific user behavior is much harder. He said that even if TikTok's gamified design choices resemble gambling, regulating it could interfere with people's free will to engage with the system. "Usually governments try to let people have a lot of freedom, even if they are making what many would think to be bad decisions," Dickinson said. "There's a general hesitancy."
Schull believes TikTok Battles, which she views as a "predatory monetization scheme," could benefit from further scrutiny. "We're bound up in these technicalities, and if we were to move beyond them, we could apply a lot of gambling regulation to this stuff," Schull said. "It really is the Wild West when it comes to so much of the stuff out there happening on the internet," she added.
When TikTok becomes your family
Design issues aside, numerous users emphasized that the connections they forged with specific TikTokers made it particularly challenging to stop gifting.
By July 2022, White settled on watching a few favorite TikTokers. There was J-Hop, a baseball-cap-clad thirst-trapper who often showed off his tattoo sleeves; PrettyBoyAli, an influencer known for throwing comedic insults at his opponents and hyping up his gifters with a signature booming, baritone voice; and Rick Brown, a 54-year-old former tech executive who streamed from exotic locations in Thailand and created digital portraits of other streamers as he battled them.
Many TikTokers deliberately cultivate communities around their gifters, showering big spenders with extra attention to ensure they keep coming back. In Discord channels and WhatsApp groups, influencers refer to their fans as "family" and discuss plans for upcoming Battles.
Everybody says the exact same thing: that TikTok becomes more of their family than their own family. That they feel like they belong.
Most gifters who spoke to BI emphasized the importance of these communities, which offered them a reprieve from the isolation of their everyday lives. "Everybody says the exact same thing: that TikTok becomes more of their family than their own family. That they feel like they belong," White said.
Sometimes, White would go weeks without talking to anybody except people on TikTok. In the chat sections, they would share stories from their lives. "There were a lot of isolated people," she added. When she was recovering from shoulder surgery, she was among them.
But these communities can also have a dark side.
When some TikTokers lose battles, they often berate their followers or throw tantrums during a match.
Gifters also said they were more likely to give influencers money if the influencers were upset. "That's how you make them feel better. We've got to show some extra love by emptying our pockets," Kandi Girling, a 44-year-old former gifter who lives in the Minneapolis area, told BI.
Another gifter, Sharina Shaw, a 29-year-old radiology student from Washington, DC, said that gifting her favorite influencer during Battles often took precedence over meeting her basic needs, such as eating, buying groceries, or even paying her phone bill. Shaw said she left her phone bill unpaid for three months. Her gifting habit eventually led to mounting credit-card debt that she said she's still paying off today.
"I like to see the person I love and support smile," she said. "I like to see them win."
Schull compared TikTokers who battle to televangelist preachers. "You have to send in your tithe, and they're speaking to you through the television like they're your best friend," she said. "That's another situation where you feel like you're part of a family, but it involves money, and your belonging is performed through your gifting to very charismatic people."
Some fans frequently post videos about feeling used by creators or their abandonment when they stop sending gifts, a sentiment White shared. "There are people who I stopped gifting to, and they unfollowed me and blocked me," she said. "They didn't have much use for me anymore," she added.
'Houston?'
By July 2022, White posted her first video to TikTok confessing that she had a problem. "I'm up all night. Sometimes I'm up till 4 in the morning," she said in one of her posts. "TikTok is doing this to me," she added before questioning her gifting habit.
That summer, she also developed a special relationship with one of the streamers she donated to regularly: Rick Brown, the 54-year-old former tech executive and digital artist in Thailand. White loved watching him draw on his tablet as he streamed from tourist hotspots like the party island of Phuket or the coastal city of Pattaya. That month, the pair exchanged numbers and started calling each other regularly.
While White and Brown disagree on the closeness of the developed relationship, both said they considered the other a friend.
For White, they were confidantes. "Put it this way: he could depend on me, and I could depend on him," she said. White also said Brown discussed his recent divorce, loneliness in Thailand, and how he could attract more followers to his TikTok. In return, she said, he'd praise her artwork and poems and encourage her to take and share videos of her cat on TikTok to help her gain an audience. "I always had someone to talk to."
For Brown, befriending viewers was an integral part of the experience he was providing. "I try to get to know everybody," he said. "Memorize every single username."
He claimed that it was his job to make gifters feel good and that he'd make gifting feel "as amazing as possible" for his viewers to keep the cash flowing. "You have to understand the addiction component of it," Brown said. He compared his behavior to the sensory experience of a Vegas slot machine. "It's no different than a casino making all the trays metal so that when the coins drop, you hear the clink clink clink."
While he was grateful for White's patronage and said he considered her a "terrific" friend, he didn't believe they depended on each other. "As far as the extreme closeness of the relationship goes, I'm not really sure where that's coming from," Brown said. "Maybe that's how she felt towards me."
By the fall, White had posted two more videos online discussing her spending problem on TikTok. Brown, it seems, had taken notice. Underneath one, he commented, "Houston?" White responded: "We have a problem."
Though, according to White, they didn't discuss her out-of-control spending until May 2023. By then, her bank statements were endless TikTok charges. On one of their calls that month, Brown brought up another gifter who also told him she had a spending problem, which led White to discuss her habit.
"It made me feel awful," Brown said. "It made me feel like: well if they're addicted — then how many other people are addicted? Not just to me, but to these other creators." In response, Brown asked her not to spend any more money on him.
It made me feel like: well if they're addicted — then how many other people are addicted? Not just to me, but to these other creators.
While Brown didn't offer to return any money, he did send White three prints of his art: One of a Holstein bull — which he titled "Mooving Along —" the others were mosaic-like paintings of an elephant and Bella, White's tabby cat. "I said to them, my hope is my art will become so valuable that whatever you gifted me, I'm gifting you back tenfold" Brown recalled.
When asked why he had not raised the issue of money earlier, especially if he had seen White's videos about her addiction, Brown waffled. "I don't remember because at that time, it wasn't important to me," he said. Brown claimed he did not remember seeing White's videos in 2022 and suggested a social-media team that manages his TikTok account responded on his behalf. "They don't do every video, but they do some," he said. "It could be me. I don't know."
White doesn't blame Brown. He was one of many creators she was spending money on. And by the time they spoke about her problem, she'd already shrugged off gentle nudges from her family and friends for months. "My brother said it, my best friend said it, my therapist said it, but it didn't sink in," White said. "I was like: 'They don't get it. They don't know the enjoyment I get from it.'"
Quitting wasn't easy. Shortly after the conversation with Brown, White asked PayPal to block her payments to TikTok. But she immediately set up another account to buy gifts on the platform. "I had to go use another credit card. Just like an addict," she said. "I probably used three different credit cards."
To help wean herself off, she switched to tapping on the battle screen, sending a flurry of tiny heart emojis fluttering up the side of the feed at no cost or buying roses, the cheapest TikTok gift.
Her relationship with Brown also faded over the year. By the fall, he also decided to stop battling altogether. White still sent him money at least once more, believing he didn't have enough income after stopping. "Not massive amounts," she clarified. "I wasn't gifting him any money because he wasn't doing Live Battles anymore."
These days, she browses regular livestreams, mainly seeking out country singers. She'll reward them with a small rose in exchange for a song or to hear them say her name.
She still sometimes indulges creators with a tiny splurge — though never during Battles. In November, she spent $13 on a "galaxy" gift for an influencer named Paulette, who livestreams her life with her six cats.
"I just gave her a galaxy because she said: 'If anyone ever gave me a galaxy, I'd probably cry,'" White said. "I won't do it again," she added. "I just wanted to see what her reaction was."