Flip the camera trend on TikTok: What is it and why are people upset?

There's a new trend on TikTok and everyone hates it.

It's one of those trends you might have found out not because you saw people using it, but because you saw people hating on it — at least that's how it was served up to me, on a plate of disgust.

The trend goes like this: A group of people, typically kids, gives their phone to someone else and asks them to record them doing a dance. They record the dance on the front-facing camera so the dancers can see themselves and at the end of the dance, they move towards the camera and flip it to reveal the person recording them.

The trend is a few weeks old, according to Know Your Meme, which reported that it likely started towards the end of October with a video from TikTok creator @jaycrudddy. The video has 1.3 million views.

This might sound like a silly trend with unoffensive consequences, but many people online are labeling it as bullying because the person chosen to record is often someone the dancing kids are trying to make fun of, be it a less popular kid, a person struggling with homelessness, or an elderly person. The punchline of the video is almost always at the expense of the recorders.

In an Instagram post about the trend, user @coquettesvanilla, who has over 41,400 followers, said the trend has "turned into straight up bullying" and saying the trend might seem small but leads to people feeling "insecure" and "like they’re not good enough."

"We shouldn’t be building a whole trend around tearing someone down," @coquettesvanilla wrote. "Bullying isn’t always loud or obvious, sometimes it hides behind 'it’s just for fun.' But if someone gets hurt, then it wasn’t fun to begin with. We can choose to be better. We can choose not to add to the negativity or make people feel ashamed of themselves. Social media doesn’t have to be a place where people get laughed at, it can be a place where we actually respect each other."

Other users have echoed @coquettesvanilla's sentiment.

One user with 14,400 followers on TikTok, @hhyy1037, called the trend "disgusting."

"Nine times out of 10, that person looks like the sweetest, kindest, most innocent human being. You can tell they were just trying to be nice, probably quiet, probably introverted, maybe not even part of that friend group for real," @hhyy1037 said.

Even @Tinx, a creator with 1.5 million followers on TikTok, made a video about the trend calling it out for bullying.

"I'm not a mom but if I found out my kids did that, I would ground them forever. I'm serious I think that is one of the mean- it's not even mean, it's cruel," Tinx said. "It's straight up cruelty. It's so mean-spirited."