By 5:00 AM, his phone was a strobe light. Every video he’d ever made had 50k likes. Then 80k. Then 120k. The numbers stopped looking like real engagement and started looking like a fever dream. He tried to delete his account, but the TikTok server kept timing out—too many likes flooding the pipes, too many ghost hearts clogging the system.

And it was liking his videos at a rate of exactly 1.5 likes per second.

Jaylen dropped his phone. It didn’t bounce. It just kept buzzing there on the carpet, screen alive with an infinite row of red hearts, each one flickering like a tiny, tireless second heartbeat—somewhere deep in the machine, a loop that had found its favorite song and refused to let it end.

Physical devices or browser extensions, like the TikTok Lives Auto Liker, that simulate rapid tapping on the screen—often used to support live streams.