"you didn't read that, you saw it on TikTok"

getting all our information from TikTok may not be our fault, but it is our problem

This essay was originally published in Culture Vulture, my newsletter about the internet. For more of this kind of content, you should go and subscribe!

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The other day I was getting lunch with some friends and as we were chatting away I mentioned an article I’d read. I’d just started to explain what it was about when one of my friends stopped me and said “oh, I saw a TikTok about exactly that!”

They’d caught me in a lie I hadn’t even realised I was telling: that I hadn’t “read” about this at all. I’d seen the same TikTok about it that they had and was either too ashamed to admit - or maybe even unaware of - where I’d found my information (yikes!)

Descending into what I can only call a moment of internet crisis, I turned to someone I knew I could trust (via email, not TikTok)

kate lindsay

from

Embedded

who immediately validated that even the best of us are doing this:

“I think it's tempting to be like, people are telling this white lie because they're embarrassed to admit the truth, but when it happens to me, it's so unconscious that I have a hard time believing my brain is doing it intentionally.”

Kate and I are both people who pride ourselves on being able to discern a good internet source from a bad one (and whose JOB it is to do exactly that), so if we were gonna call ourselves out on it, I thought it was worth sharing.

It’s incidental exposure, innit

We all saw the alarm bells ring when it was reported that TikTok is overtaking Google for where Gen Z goes to search things, but what about when you aren’t searching for anything? What about when the information finds YOU?

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that most of us have opened up TikTok for a little bedtime reprieve and accidentally learnt about something happening in the world from a random person with a hot take. This has a name: it’s called incidental exposure. It’s incidental because you didn’t go to TikTok to find your news (I still believe very few people would admit to that) but the news FOUND YOU on TikTok. And when the ‘news’ is sandwiched in between a clip from the Era’s tour and a comedy sketch, you’re likely to give all three of these videos the same amount of time and attention. Unfortunately, current events deserve and require more attention than your fave influencer’s ‘get ready with me,’ but when we’re incidentally exposed to it we aren’t in the position to give it that attention.

We don’t go to TikTok to think deeply or to, dare I say corroborate, so, we see something, we believe it - we might even share it with others to prove that we care and that we aren’t wasting all our time on this app without making any type of contribution to the world - and then we scroll on without much of a second thought. This, my friends, is how easily misinformation spreads.

I know what you’re thinking: “It’s all a trap! And it’s not even our fault! We aren’t trying to get our news here, it just happens!” To that, I say - I get it!! Don’t beat yourself up, we’re all learning things from TikTok and it’s not all bad:

“We're past the time when saying you learned something from TikTok should be considered silly. The app is providing valuable on-the-ground insight into world events that legacy media cannot. I don't think getting news from TikTok should be considered irresponsible or lazy, because it's basically a real-time look into everything that's happening in the world,” says Kate.

I reckon that the least we can do when we’re incidentally exposed to news on our fave app is leave the app, look it up elsewhere, AND, if we’re choosing to pass this information on to someone else, be clear that we found it on TikTok (and not pretend we read an article about it because we feel insecure about how we truly learnt it.)

It’s not just news, TikTok is eating everything else too

This might be the most lukewarm take I could possibly bring you, but TikTok incidentally exposes us to more than just current events. For example:

• I once watched about 27 three-minute clips of a movie about two girls who climbed up a really high pole and then got stuck at the top, and would now comfortably tell people that I’ve “seen that movie.”

• I’ve recently moved to Lisbon, and places I’ve never been before sometimes feel familiar by the time I get to them, because I’ve seen them on LisbonTok, and probably saved them to refer back to later.

• If I still had to do reading reports I would have long traded in SparkNotes for my favourite BookToker’s summary of what happened, telling my teacher that of course I’d “read” the book they’d set. (Yes, either way, I probably wouldn’t have read the book, but at least with SparkNotes I was having to read SOMETHING.)

It’s like I go on TikTok and am accidentally served up everything I could possibly want: movie recs, up-and-coming musicians, places I should travel, the list goes on.

Except none of this is really by accident at all, is it?

As I chatted about in my piece about the ‘what about me?’ effect, our algorithms are programmed to tell/show us the information it thinks is going to best align with whatever values it believes we have. But if we’re only being exposed to things the algorithms think we’ll benefit from, not only do we run the risk of being pushed into an echo chamber we didn’t even opt into (goodbye agency!), but the information might not be entirely true.

“What's concerning is that we're not in charge of the news we consume on TikTok, our algorithm is, and we're relying on relatively weak moderation to prevent mis/disinformation,” says Kate.

As Kate said earlier, TikTok can be an amazing tool for giving us access to on-the-ground reporting that we may have never seen before. But this access to more first-hand information should not be confused with access to a wider range of views or perspectives. Thanks to these algorithms (which we have very little control over) we are likely being pushed into singular and separate ‘sides’ of things - if you linger too long on a video (even if you’re just watching it to try and see a different perspective) it’s likely that you’re going to start seeing more and more content with similar viewpoints as that, and it’s also likely that soon your whole feed will only be showing you that perspective. It’s how you can be obsessing over the latest TJ Mack single while your fellow TikTok-loving friend has no idea who he is, or how people like Andrew Tate can begin to dominate a side of the internet that most of us don’t see until his influence has swelled to scary heights.

We can’t work without it, so we better work within it

I’m 1) not an idiot, and 2) love TikTok, so I’m not suggesting that things will miraculously change, or that we should abolish TikTok because too many people are finding their information there. Kate is even less of an idiot and equally as much of a TikTok enthusiast, so she unsurprisingly has some useful thoughts on this:

“Obviously, there are valid concerns about people making up news on TikTok, but I think when we say "I read an article" to mean "I saw a TikTok," more often than not the TikTok is a person distilling something they learned from an article, and our brain is just cutting out the middleman.

Overall, I think the news industry still exists… but TikTok is the established intermediary and all these industries need to accept and find ways to work with that reality, instead of lamenting it.”

When I think about the problem that birthed Shit You Should Care About, it was that the news felt boring and none of us (Gen Z) were seeking out long articles or sitting down to watch the 6pm news. News organisations should have been the ones to attack this problem, but they fumbled the bag and individuals on TikTok (or Instagram) beat them to it. Now we don’t have to sit down to watch the news because the news is only a few scrolls away. And we don’t have to worry about getting bored because we can just scroll to something more entertaining (that, or there’s a Subway Surfers clip playing alongside the ‘boring’ video to hold our attention.) Information suffers when the organisations with the resources aren’t the ones getting the mass reach, which is the point we’ve reached today, where lots of us are getting our information from largely unverifiable sources on TikTok.

Annoyingly I don’t have a solution to this, but a good start could be a little more honesty from us all. Next time you find yourself saying you read/saw/heard something somewhere, but you can’t recall where from, just admit that it was from TikTok. And maybe fact-check it.