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Senior Correspondent covering technology and culture

This spring, I saw a TikTok that intrigued me. Befuddled me, maybe I should say. A woman sat on her bed and screamed into a pillow. The text across the middle of the screen read, "this feels worse than texting your ex." A pinned comment said "She def doesn't know about this audio lol."

Confusing, right? I know my description doesn't make any sense. Neither did the video. That was the problem.

I tried to tap into the caption at the bottom to see what comment the video was in response to, so I could understand the context (turns out it was about an earlier video she made about her Coachella outfit, where she accidentally used a thematically inappropriate song playing over it, kind of a let-down, to be honest).

But instead, somehow I tapped something that immediately sent the video as a DM to one of my contacts, Maura Johnston.

This was kind of embarrassing, but it also wasn't the first time I've accidentally sent TikToks to Johnson. In fact, I've accidentally sent her so many TikToks that this wasn't even among the more embarrassing ones I've done. I've also accidentally sent her ones about lesbian dating, birth control pills, storytimes about college hookups, and the sound an MRI machine makes.

Johnston isn't a close friend that I DM with often. She's more of a friendly professional acquaintance — a fellow journalist — but she isn't someone I'd normally send videos about the pros and cons of hormonal birth control to. In fact, I wouldn't normally send most of those videos to my closest friends — they weren't particularly funny or relevant to my friends or me.

That's part of what was so embarrassing about these accidentally DM'd TikToks — they were the kind of feed-filler stuff that normally isn't send-worthy.

One comfort in all of this is that I know I'm not alone. My colleague, Peter Kafka, also keeps accidentally sending me TikToks. The thing is, the videos he sends are pretty normal — mostly news or sports clips. This just makes me feel even worse about how comparatively embarrassing my accidentally sent videos are.

I've asked TikTok if they were aware of this problem or why it's happening. I wish I could give you clear advice about how to stop doing this, I'm not 100% sure how I'm doing it in the first place. There seem to be two separate ways a person might accidentally send a DM.

The first is long-pressing the arrow button on the side of a video. When you merely tap it, it opens a menu to copy the link. But if you press and hold, it opens an instant DM option with the avatars of three of your friends. From there, you can send it as a DM without having to write a message or any extra taps.

The second option is more likely for videos with long captions, where you mean to tap "more" to expand the full caption.

When you long-press the bottom of the screen on a video, it opens a menu. When I do this on a video in my normal FYP, there's no option to send the video — but if I do it from a video inside a hashtag search, the menu looks different — and has a list of those people to easily send it to.

Although I'm not 100% sure, my guess is that I'm doing these accidental DMs when I tap the "more" button too long, opening this menu.

Thankfully, Johnston has been very kind about this. I had immediately apologized to her for all the errant videos, and she totally understood — she's done it, too.

If there's any upside to this embarrassing situation, it's that it's given me a reason to chat with her. There are certainly people out there whom I would be much more embarrassed to accidentally send TikToks to!

In some ways, I feel that this is my penance for wasting time on TikTok. Rolling the dice on occasionally getting shamed is a good way for me to manage my screen time!

Be careful out there, folks.

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Katie Notopoulos

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Katie Notopoulos is a senior correspondent at Business Insider who writes about technology, business, and culture. She covers topics such as internet culture, Big Tech, retail, AI, parenting in the digital age, and personal tech.Previously, Katie was a tech reporter at BuzzFeed News and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Fast Company, and MIT Technology Review. Based in New York, you can reach her by email [email protected] or find her on Twitter. Bluesky, and Threads @katienotopoulos.Some of her stories include:

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• TikTok