The Phrase "Glass Cleaner" Is Trending on TikTok, but Not Because of Dirty Windows

Few social media platforms are more random than TikTok, but even by their standards, the latest trend around "glass cleaner" is a bit of a head-scratcher. The phrase has popped up all over the platform, with many users encouraging one another to search the term.

You might be suspecting that "glass cleaner" has nothing to do with Windex or any other product you might use to clean actual glass. Here's what we know about the phrase and why it's suddenly trending.

Apparently, some users are suggesting that if you search the phrase "glass cleaner" on TikTok, the videos that will pop up will be ... explicit in nature. Plenty of people have tried this, though, and if it was ever true, it no longer is. Now, when you search the phrase, you get videos of people actually cleaning glass or videos of people discussing their confusion around being encouraged to search for it.

Of course, TikTok usually has filters designed to remove any pornographic material from the site, so it seems unlikely that you could ever find it by searching the phrase. It might have been possible, at least in theory, but if it was true, TikTok may have gotten wise to it very quickly and removed all of the content that had been tagged using that seemingly random term.

While there are some who swear that searching the term would get you explicit content, some people are theorizing that the whole thing was a lie from the start and that the users who were encouraging other people to search glass cleaner were only doing that so that they could convince people to search for the term and maybe get some of them to actually watch videos on the topic. It's definitely an outside-the-box ad strategy if it's true.

The morality of porn is not even really the point here. Whether you think it's great or should be banned, it's a little strange to want it to show up on TikTok. There are plenty of other places on the internet that you can go to if that's what you're looking for. TikTok is expressly not a platform for porn, and we probably shouldn't want it to turn into one.

The reasons for that aren't just because there are plenty of children on TikTok, although that's a pretty good reason in and of itself. The bigger reason, though, is that we should want TikTok to be the delightful and fairly normal place that it has been for most of its existence.

That's not to say that nothing weird has ever happened there, but letting the platform be overrun with porn kind of defeats the purpose of having online spaces that don't have porn on them.

So no, searching "glass cleaner" is not going to get you any inappropriate videos. And maybe you shouldn't really want it to.