The Guy Who Started the ‘Scientology Run’ TikTok Trend Says It’s Time to Stop
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The endless runner games have come to real life. Last month, a TikToker going by the handle Swhileyy ran through the Scientology building in Los Angeles, California, to see how far he could get before a member of the church could stop him. That has created a trend of people replicating the run, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, Swhileyy would really like them to stop.
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Swhileyy’s original run, which he filmed on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, was posted on TikTok on March 31st, and managed to amass more than 90 million views. It resulted in another creator, isdurpyy, to replicate it, per THR. And since then, the copycats have been cropping up all over. A group of teens reportedly made their own run through the Scientology building with masks on and air horns in hand. Another run at the Scientology church in Palm Springs, Florida resulted in an arrest because one of the runners shot out one of the building’s windows with a BB gun.
Swhileyy apparently doesn’t think those guys are doing it right—and shouldn’t be doing it at all. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “I never once in any video or any comment section or anywhere promoted the idea of running through there or beating my record.” Which is… technically true, but when you post a video labeled as the “Deepest recorded Scientology run,” it does make it sound like it’s a thing.
It seems pretty clear that this thing just broke containment in a way that Swhileyy, who is 18 years old, wasn’t prepared for. Now he’s doing a lot of work to differentiate himself from his copycats. He said of the copycats, “They should not have done that shit,” and called his own video a “one-off” that was not designed to target Scientology—though he also said in the same conversation that after he made a different video about the church, “From there on out, I pretty much knew that Scientology was like a free gateway to a lot of views.”
Read more https://gizmodo.com/the-guy-who-started-the-scientology-run-tiktok-trend-says-its-time-to-stop-2000750516
Content retrieved from: https://gizmodo.com/the-guy-who-started-the-scientology-run-tiktok-trend-says-its-time-to-stop-2000750516.
