On Wednesday, August 9th, an announcement appeared on the Instagram account belonging to 16-year-old influencer Lil Tay<\/a>, real name Tay Tian. The message said that Lil Tay, along with her brother, Jason, had suddenly and unexpectedly died.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This was the first time anything had been posted to Lil Tay\u2019s account in five years. While she first went viral in 2018 for her combative and brash personality, she faded back offline after just a few months. The statement was abrupt. But it appeared to come straight from the family, and it was posted directly on the account of the creator herself. Why wouldn\u2019t it be true?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The news exploded across social media, propelled by creators on TikTok sharing and reacting<\/a> to the Instagram post. Many outlets also ran with the story, some reporting confirmation from an unnamed management team. Then, on August 10th, Lil Tay shared a statement directly with TMZ<\/em><\/a>: both she and her brother were alive. Her Instagram account had, supposedly, been hacked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The debacle exemplifies how social media has radically changed and complicated the news environment. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have grown beyond making connections and delivering entertainment into places people trust to keep themselves informed\u00a0\u2014 in part because they can hear stories directly from the source.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A Pew Research Center study found TikTok is where almost a quarter<\/a> of US adults under 30 now regularly get their news. Another recent study<\/a> found that influencers are overtaking journalists as the primary news source for young people, with audiences preferring to get their news from \u201cpersonalities\u201d like celebrities and influencers rather than mainstream news outlets or journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen there\u2019s no face to it, it seems like it\u2019s a corporation, and corporations to a lot of Gen Z equal bad or untrustworthy,\u201d says Lucy Blakiston, the co-founder behind the Gen Z media company Shit You Should Care About<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Gen Z fell headfirst into the world of influencers forced to report on and police themselves<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The shift is particularly acute for Gen Z, who fell headfirst into the world of influencers and other online creators. This generation was raised among digital communities that were overlooked by traditional news outlets and forced to report on and police themselves through makeshift authorities like drama channels. If audiences wanted to hear news or have rumors debunked about their favorite creator, they would have to hear it from the creator themselves or a similar digital primary source.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Members of these communities became adept at a kind of citizen journalism that they now apply to more traditional news, prioritizing a first-person source or someone with relevant experience over the expertise of an unfamiliar journalist or stuffy publication. A recent study<\/a> by Google\u2019s Jigsaw unit, published alongside the University of Cambridge and Gemic, found this to be the case on TikTok as early as 2018 \u2014\u00a0the year it debuted in the US \u2014 with a participant investigating a rumor that Katy Perry had killed a nun.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThey were disappointed to find no stories from major news sources that definitively answered this question,\u201d the study says. \u201cThey went to TikTok and concluded that if Katy Perry fans hadn\u2019t weighed in, the story must not be true. They trusted Katy Perry fans, who engaged with and reported on her activities daily, to know the truth.\u201d (For what it\u2019s worth, what actually happened is a nun involved in a property dispute with Perry collapsed and died<\/a> in court.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In other cases, overwhelmed by the sheer number of news sources out there, the study found that Gen Z consumers would rely on a \u201cgo-to\u201d source through which they\u2019d filter current events. Often, this was an online personality with similar values.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a sense of pureness in the independent media landscape,\u201d Jules Terpak<\/a>, a content creator who covers tech and digital culture, says. \u201cTheir audience is witnessing their growth from 0 to 100. The relationship built is far more personal. The underlying trust built is more friend-like.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In some cases, this system of small creator news works. Reddit was where Try Guys fans first began speculating in fall 2022 that now-former Try Guy Ned Fulmer had cheated on his wife with an employee. This was based on firsthand accounts from fans who had spotted Fulmer and the employee at a concert as well as clues that suggested Fulmer had been cut out of recent videos. After a few weeks of this discussion, the Try Guys confirmed the affair and that they had parted ways with Fulmer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In other cases, the system can fail in unfortunate ways. Celebrity gossip account Deuxmoi<\/a> took off during the pandemic for the account owner\u2019s claims to have inside information that traditional media wouldn\u2019t report on. The account has over 2 million followers and is often the source of rumors<\/a> that traditional outlets then chase. But often enough, those rumors turn out to be wrong. Most notably, during the midst of the search for the missing submersible in June, the account posted \u2014 and later deleted \u2014 an anonymous tip<\/a> that all five passengers had been found alive. Two days later, US Coast Guard officials announced<\/a> that the passengers had instead all died within the first few hours of the trip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Influencers are becoming aware of their role in the news cycle, for better or for worse. Recently, creator Dani Carbonari went viral for referring to herself as an \u201cinvestigative journalist\u201d<\/a> while on a Shein-sponsored trip to one of their factories. Carbonari used her now-deleted video to \u201cdebunk\u201d legitimate reports of Shein\u2019s labor violations, which include<\/a> subjecting workers to 12\u201314-hour days and permitting just one day off a month. When called out for the impartiality of reporting on a company that is, in fact, sponsoring and dictating the entire reporting trip, Carbonari doubled down<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The spread of misinformation is often blamed on the tech illiteracy of boomers, but Gen Z\u2019s enthusiastic use of social media can give false stories exponentially bigger reach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In February 2022, Terpak covered how Gen Z accidentally spread a false narrative about athlete Sha\u2019Carri Richardson. Richardson was unable to compete in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics \u2014 held in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic \u2014 after receiving a 30-day suspension after testing positive for THC; meanwhile, Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva similarly tested positive for a banned heart medication ahead of the 2021 Winter Olympics in December but was allowed to compete. Richardson and others were quick to point out how race may have played a role in these seemingly contradictory rulings, and an Instagram infographic posted by Gen Z political nonprofit Path to Progress ran with it. The post was shared by thousands of people, motivated by a sense of social justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In reality, as Terpak points out in her video, the reason for the different rulings came down to age. Valieva was 15 at the time, making her a protected person under the world agency\u2019s doping code.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThough the comments were full of people calling out the inaccuracy of this content, who looks at Instagram comments of these types of accounts?\u201d Terpak asked in the video.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For current adolescents, schools are making an effort to address this problem, but it\u2019s not standardized and can be out of touch.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019ll be like, \u2018don\u2019t trust Wikipedia,\u2019\u201d Laura Hazard Owen, editor of Nieman Journalism Lab<\/a>, says. \u201cThat\u2019s not good advice. Wikipedia is a great source to start with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Blakiston\u2019s Gen Z-focused media company, Shit You Should Care About, is careful to use only legitimate sources in their daily newsletter<\/a>, linking to the established news outlets their 77,000 readers likely wouldn\u2019t pore through themselves. Blakiston leans heavily on personality to maintain that trust with younger readers and to prevent ever seeming too much like news with a capital N. Every dispatch begins by addressing the readers as \u201clil shits\u201d and is written informally in the first person. But that intimacy can be a double-edged sword, especially when the person Gen Z readers trust to curate news for them lets them down. If their followers disagree with the news Blakiston chooses to highlight, the backlash can get personal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt changes the way and the place that we cover things,\u201d she says. \u201cFor anything that requires heavy nuance, I won\u2019t even go near Instagram.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The social media news machine also emerged from the ashes of a decimated traditional news ecosystem. In 2022, Northwestern University\u2019s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications found that<\/a> local news outlets were folding at a rate of two newspapers a week. The media industry announced<\/a> more than 17,000 cuts in the first half of 2023, the highest year to date on record. Cable news also saw a drop<\/a> this year, one that isn\u2019t likely to dramatically reverse, as only 6 percent of Gen Z claim<\/a> to watch cable news daily, and 48 percent claim they never watch it at all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Internal struggles aside, the choppy and competitive waters of today\u2019s news environment mean, like in the case of Lil Tay, outlets can similarly get duped, losing readers\u2019 trust and driving them back to the creator ecosystem. \u201cOften news organizations do make bad decisions,\u201d Owen says. \u201cYou can sometimes feel like you\u2019re in this murkiness of \u2018Oh my God, I can\u2019t trust anything,\u2019 which is such a dangerous place to be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The only thing standing between true and false might be one single creator.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n V Spehar, the TikToker behind Under The Desk News<\/a>, didn\u2019t have a journalism background when they first joined TikTok and planned to use it as a place to post culinary videos. But their quick takes on day-to-day news items ended up winning them an audience, and they now have 3 million followers tuning in for their daily political updates filmed, as the name suggests, under a desk.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Los Angeles Times<\/em> took note of V\u2019s success and tapped them<\/a> to help launch its own personality-based TikTok account<\/a>. They\u2019re one of many publications attempting to recreate the success of individual creators on TikTok within their newsroom. The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s account<\/a> shot to fame in 2019 thanks to host Dave Jorgenson\u2019s irreverent reimaginations of the news and has since earned over 1.6 million followers and added a handful of additional hosts, including Carmella Boykin and, most recently, Chris Chang.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Chafe as legacy media might, Gen Z is giving them no choice but to adapt \u2014 or get lost in the algorithm. Google\u2019s Jigsaw study found that young news consumers were reluctant to proactively sift through information. One participant said he felt no need to search or follow news and politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen stuff is important,\u201d he said, \u201cit gets shared.\u201d As long as it\u2019s not legacy media doing the sharing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n