Some of the accounts started last year as a joke among friends. An anthropomorphized Mount Hood was warring with Mount Rainier on TikTok, with the creators behind them exchanging jabs in the comments sections? Why not.
But in February, when cuts to the National Park Service spurred concern by some over the future of public lands in the United States, the creators of numerous unofficial accounts for national parks and forests shifted their focus to creating awareness of the famous places that they had adopted.
And now, many of those accounts have stumbled upon a new approach to attract followers: adding some sex appeal.
This week, an account with the display name Yellowstone National Park, and the handle Visit.Yellowstone, posted a video that started with the popular TikTok creator Thoren Bradley taking off his shirt before cutting to a clip of a panorama of mountains and water in Yellowstone.
The video, with a caption extolling the virtues of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres, has generated more than seven million views. It also has hundreds of comments cheering on what some people clearly took as surprising content from what they assumed was a national park’s official TikTok page. The account’s popularity exploded, reaching one million followers.
