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Brendan O'Connor on our TV Radio One. Lots of warm texts about Louise O'Neill, your guest sounds like a gorgeous person, an inspiring love Louise is writing really looking forward to a new one. Could listen to her all day, a breath of fresh air and on and on and on. And she wants Grace, wasn't she? Now from the sublime to the wealth, not ridiculous. But a couple of days ago it was announced that a group of Irish social media influencers have moved into a so-called Tic-Tac house in Dublin.

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And Fionnula Moren is a show biz journalist with Divorc and The Irish Mail on Sunday, and she joins me now on the line.

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Good morning, Fionnula. Hi, Brendan. How are you?

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Now, before we talk about the Galtos, I hate to do this to you, but there will be some people who need this explained before you even tell us what a tick tock house is. What is tick tock somewhere up in a couple of sentences.

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So tick tock of the social media platform. People share a short video snippets on it. If you have any school aged children, in case you wondering a little viral dance news that all of the kids learn on the platform, if you're not on tick tock, you might be familiar with to examine. And his family, they were on the radio, but you provided loads of entertainment for people during the and or as well another famous Irish tick talk. I was kind of like story also known as Tadpole Girl.

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She was documenting the raising of seven tadpoles in her back garden as the platform for daily updates. So it's just a really fun video platform. It wouldn't have been massive among people of older generations, including myself and not a 28. It's really for younger people, but there's so much fun content on there. It just surged massively in Ireland during Lockdown's and those people. And I've enjoyed a few short videos and it's huge.

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And there's a lot of a lot of these Takenaka influencers are starting to make a lot of money as well, aren't they?

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Absolutely. So we would have seen people with maybe 100000 followers on Instagram earning six figure salaries before the numbers on Facebook are so much bigger than Instagram, they're actually mind blowing. You could be getting millions upon millions of views on these videos. So brands are just starting to look towards that now and capitalize on that. So massive income to be made for really young stars on the platform.

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And tell us then, what is a tick tock house then?

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So high paying jobs and content houses are things that started in the U.S. We saw them first. But YouTube has always been going into these houses together, especially if they're under the same management company. And you can see what anyone has ever asked a less tech savvy relative to maybe take a photo of them and they get a picture back their ankles and their faces and a all. You can see why people would want to live together to make a really cool video content.

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It's beneficial like that. So basically, they all get together, help each other, make videos. They do collaborations as well, which will mean someone will appear in someone else's channel and then swap over and do bits of the other person's channel as well. And it's just basically to boost everyone's following and they sound most to them as well. But with the Kotite, which has been set up in Dublin, that's the name of the first Irish MySpace that we have.

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It's an acronym for the greatest of all time. And it's a lovely rental house. I'm very jealous of enfold bridge. Absolutely gorgeous. And it was sold this week by J.K. Rowling and Thomas Arnold.

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Okay, okay. Stop. Tell us who they are first now. So J.

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Brand is a videographer and content marketing. Just finished college this week. He without his own big social media following as well. I think he's 45000 followers on Twitter. And Jake Ryan would also be famous on those platforms as well. So they think some of Ireland's best creators and love them all enjoy life together and to pitch it out, he said, I graduated from college essay today. I launched a new business. What is a can include? There's eight million followers on one, say, Dublin Mansion, my new project to go to content creation for our Las Vegas social media influencers.

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So that's why I came online on social media midweek. And fallout from that has been a little bit mad, as you can imagine.

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OK, so tell us first before we talk about there's there's obviously been a disaster already, but tell us first, who are the other people who are in the house and what kind of stuff do they do? I know I'm sounding a granddad here or something. Know, but just explain it to us anyway, Brendan.

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I'm only twenty years and it's still well beyond my age group right there with the and as I comedian Robin Marr in there, we've got a couple who create all their content gather there. And to me with Kelly, just to give you an idea of some of these figures, they have almost 250000 followers together on Instagram. There's Lauren Wheelin as well. She has over 320000 followers on takes.

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OK, so what does Lauren Wieland do on take talk? Like, is she miming to songs or is it comedy or what are you doing?

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So I wouldn't be familiar with her as a content creator, but a lot of the stuff on Twitter is miming videos of different stuff like that and dances.

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OK, you can appreciate what this is sounding like to grown adults at home. They're going these young people, it's worse. It's getting. And so they're basically a lot of it is they just mime to is it fifteen seconds or so and they do a song and do a little dance.

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Totally. Yeah. I mean you can do totally different and things with lots of animal content. You content on there. I love all the home and. Here are your designs. They'll be ready, set up the home renovation, but so whatever you're into, whether it's a specific sport or anything like that, in so many different alua, you can go to an antique shop and find content that you love. It's really got everything in the top form there.

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But the darn thing is the massive break thing on the top floor.

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OK, and I know that, like songs that have been dredged up from a few years ago are kind of obscure songs. Tick-Tock is now a big way of making songs into massive hits, isn't it?

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Absolutely. So we've seen all of the creators kind of merely writing little bits into their songs that will go viral on Tick-Tock. So it's really change in the music production industry like that is exactly why the person you're looking into in a moment, Martha, what went into that really successful Irish producer and probably the best example of someone in the music production industry using Tick-Tock in Ireland as a marketing tool for their own music? OK, there's a texture here. Probably some people are thinking, what fresh hell is this that says the texts are like?

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The thing is, it's easy to sneer, but these are young people and presumably they are going to make money, make a career out of this or, you know, pay their way through college or whatever.

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Yeah, absolutely. Brendan, I don't want to enrage your listeners, but a lot of these creators will pay for their first in cash, which is just something that is unthinkable for most people under 30. But it is a brilliant opportunity. A lot of the people in this content are heading into different media courses, starting them all soon. So you can see if they've already got a grasp of this content, even if you don't keep creating content forever, if they decide to get behind the camera.

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You can imagine how valuable that information would be to an advertising agency or anyone trying to get in touch with the younger demographic who have been notoriously hard to reach by marketing campaigns in recent years.

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Now, I gather that online is a very lovely place with people in mind 15 seconds of a song and everyone telling them they're great. But there's another side to Israel I gathered. This whole Galtos story has brought out the worst of bigotry and a lot of outrage. People has that.

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Absolutely. So obviously, any time we bring something, this kind of very American over to Ireland, we have our normal amount of second hand embarrassment for everyone involved. That's all well and good. We accept that we can't really deal with those things as a nation. But it did get very, very sinister online. And there's a bit of a pile on on market. Guilfoile far. I just mentioned that British music producer and it use the Taketo platform really cleverly to promote his music.

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So he had signed up for this project to go in and boost the Spotify stream. But as of yesterday, I think it was he was the number one trending name on Twitter, the number one trend on Twitter altogether. And people saying really, really nasty things, horrific things they did in a sexual element, like projecting a sexual element where there was not one calling him a creep. The comment got so bad as to call him a paedophile.

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I say horrific, which is absolutely he's absolutely not no basis for any of that exact occurrence.

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And so people had come on, I'm like, oh, that's just my opinion. I don't know. I'm acting as if he signed up for love. I I'm saying there is no sexual element to this. This is a business contract. They've all going to have to make videos together. And there is a huge pile on on social media, a compilation almost before any conceivable actions had happened. It's not like the girls in this case are saying anything about him.

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This was purely people on social media making up that they felt him going into this with some girls who were a little bit younger than them. But it's not like he was the only person a little bit older. And they when I say older, he's my age, just in his late 20s. Jake in the house is also around twenty nine. I think Thomas is twenty four are in there, say 27 or 28. Ryan is 21, the couple in their 20s on the girls in their 80s and 90s.

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So all pretty much within a decade of each other, just going in to shared passions, make videos together and people have treated it like this whole other thing. And to the point that Martin has put out a statement yesterday, he'd already left the house. You'd explain that when he went in, he totally safe and that he was thinking it was just so horrible what had gone on to me. He said, I can take as long and as well as the next guy.

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But what really upset me are the suggestions of signing up for a work project with a group of adults is somehow weird or predatory. And so a lot of people defended him obviously yesterday because he is looking great pleasure, working great my career. But I'm just mad to see the way that pylon went.

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OK, well, listen, listen, there's nothing new about that. It's the age old thing for New Year. The first thing on the agenda in any Irish gathering is the split. So there you go. We've had displays are already fionnula more. Thanks a million and look at them. That one to find all the content will know where to look. We won't give out a load of of of addresses. Let's take a quick bit of music. No, this is short and sweet.

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This is Randy Newman and this is Simon Smith and the amazing Dancing Bear.