The internet has never met a teen trend it couldn’t warp into something darker, but TikTok’s latest stunt manages to feel both familiar and surprisingly bleak. It’s called the “flip the camera” challenge, and it’s got parents, creators, and every elder millennial who remembers chain emails about curses rethinking why we ever handed smartphones to the youth.

The setup is simple enough. A group of teens dances, hands a phone to some unsuspecting human, and lets them record the fun. Then one of the dancers suddenly swivels the camera toward the person holding it. That reaction gets posted. The “helpful stranger who did nothing wrong” becomes the punchline. According to news.com.au, the trend has escalated fast enough that experts are calling it a straight-up humiliation pipeline, not some PG

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