The Flightless Bird TikTok Drama Is Strange, and It Keeps Getting Stranger

By its very nature, TikTok can be home to some pretty wildly discordant kinds of videos. Some videos can be simple looks at someone dancing, or videos about pet ownership, while others can be all about discussing or excising very real trauma or dangerous situations.

Recently, a TikTok account called Flightless Bird engaged into the second kind of video, and her videos went viral on the platform. The story she told was scary enough, but that's not the end of the saga. Here's what we know about the drama around this account, and where it originated.

The drama began when a new TikTok account with the handle @flightles.bird appeared on TikTok, and her videos started appearing on people's For You Page. The videos eventually went viral and featured some pretty serious topics. They focused on her husband's behavior, which she was describing as increasingly strange and erratic in the aftermath of his being prescribed Zoloft to deal with ongoing depression.

She said that her husband was getting more aggressive toward her and their four children and that she thought he might be in the middle of some sort of psychotic or manic episode. She explained that because of their children, she didn't think she could leave him. She also said that he was having suicidal or homicidal thoughts. This woman then asked for advice from her followers and continued providing daily updates for several days.

This incredibly serious story was not the end of the saga around Birdie, as she came to be known. After several days of posting urgent and scary videos, she explained that the whole thing was not actually happening to her but was just a "reenactment" of something that had happened to her in January. This was the case even though she was behaving in the videos like she was worried that her husband might catch her filming.

She also said that she made the videos to bring awareness to mental health crises. She received substantial backlash following her confession and eventually posted an apology video in which she said that she didn't think through the negative ramifications of the videos. Shortly thereafter, her account disappeared, but TikTok users have continued to try to find more information about her.

TikTok backlash is swift and fierce, and it turns out that many of the people who were most upset by Birdie's videos have now dedicated themselves to finding out more about her. She was a former mommy blogger, apparently, and although that blog has been deleted, it's available on the Wayback Machine.

While doxxing people isn't really cool either, it seems that some TikTok users feel these extreme measures are warranted by Birdie's original behavior. All of it is a bit uncomfortable, but it was spurred by Birdie's strange posts, which have now been erased from the internet because of the backlash they caused.