The Fandomization Of News

By Kate Lindsay

On Wednesday, August 9th, an announcement appeared on the Instagram account belonging to 16-year-old influencer Lil Tay, real name Tay Tian. The message said that Lil Tay, along with her brother, Jason, had suddenly and unexpectedly died.

This was the first time anything had been posted to Lil Tay’s 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’t it be true?

The news exploded across social media, propelled by creators on TikTok sharing and reacting 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: both she and her brother were alive. Her Instagram account had, supposedly, been hacked.

A Pew Research Center study found TikTok is where almost a quarter of US adults under 30 now regularly get their news. Another recent study found that influencers are overtaking journalists as the primary news source for young people, with audiences preferring to get their news from “personalities” like celebrities and influencers rather than mainstream news outlets or journalists.

“When there’s no face to it, it seems like it’s a corporation, and corporations to a lot of Gen Z equal bad or untrustworthy,” says Lucy Blakiston, the co-founder behind the Gen Z media company Shit You Should Care About.

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.

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 by Google’s Jigsaw unit, published alongside the University of Cambridge and Gemic, found this to be the case on TikTok as early as 2018 — the year it debuted in the US — with a participant investigating a rumor that Katy Perry had killed a nun.

“They were disappointed to find no stories from major news sources that definitively answered this question,” the study says. “They went to TikTok and concluded that if Katy Perry fans hadn’t 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.” (For what it’s worth, what actually happened is a nun involved in a property dispute with Perry collapsed and died in court.)

In other cases, overwhelmed by the sheer number of news sources out there, the study found that Gen Z consumers would rely on a “go-to” source through which they’d filter current events. Often, this was an online personality with similar values.