Social Media is Not Gossip

On Sunday, January 19^th, for a brief moment in the history of American social media, TikTok was blessedly dark. The next day (and several years after introducing the idea of banning TikTok to begin with), Donald Trump once again became President and saved it. Good choice: if popularity among the American people is the goal, bringing TikTok back from the brink of the void is a content must. The algorithm will love that. Imagine the engagement.

Since the potential ban of TikTok was announced last year, a common refrain in the outcry has been that TikTok is actually necessary for democratic participation. One point of argument makes an appeal to TikTok’s facilitation of our innate human impulse to chitchat behind each other’s backs. One video I saw making the rounds that I think summarizes this argument well is by nikitadumptruck.

In case you read faster than you listen, here is a transcript of Nikita’s video:

Yappers, we are under attack. The House just passed a bill to ban TikTok because they fear its Chinese parent company could collect users’ data and feed us propaganda, you know, the way the US has never fed us propaganda. But we know the real reason this is happening is because we’re talking a little too much on this app, and all of this mimics just how gossip has been demonized for centuries. Gossip used to be a wholesome term that referred to a woman’s friends and relatives who’d keep her company after she delivered a baby, and we all know in the 16^th century men were so threatened by baddies that they started the witch hunt. That was around the time gossiping became illegal because they feared women gathering around to chat. So the worst thing that could happen to the powers in charge was when everyday people would gather to discuss their injustice. Even before that, in ancient Greece, women, slaves, and low status people would use gossip as a way to get justice against people who mistreated them. Since only rich men were allowed in courts, the rest would spread rumors as a way to bring down a bad person, and since court cases depended on reputation, gossip was a weapon of the everyday people. Look at the other places where yapping is discouraged: for many years it was frowned upon to discuss your salary. TikTok changed that. For many years, women had to sit down and tolerate an abusive relationship. TikTok changed that. TikTok didn’t even let men cheat on their wives in peace! Gossip will always scare the people who stand the most to lose from it, and right now, there is no one losing more reputation than government and businesses. We’re seeing people struggle to survive while others make millions. We’re seeing news that’s not being reported, and we’re gathering in ways that have real-world consequences. I’ll say it again—gossip will always scare the people who stand the most to lose from it. Now, this bill has many steps and hurdles, and to be honest with y’all, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. What does scare me is how willing the government is to shut down media it can’t control. If they want to shut us up on TikTok, we’ll just go somewhere else. Because one thing about yappers—we’re never gonna stop yapping.

So, it has to be stated at the outset: TikTok absolutely did not grant people the ability to discuss their salaries. A long-fought legal battle supported by labor activism did that (and among government contractors it was undone last week with a blunt stroke of Donald Trump’s fat stupid sharpie). As far as I know, abusive relationships and their justifications are as strong as they’ve ever been if not stronger, not the least reason for which is the colonization of social media by the far-right. Young men are more depressed and conservative than any other living age demographic, and Andrew Tate owes his fame to nothing more than he owes it to TikTok.

Gossip as a talking point has been having a moment in the past few years in certain pop-progressivism circles. Pull up a random episode of the podcast Normal Gossip (which, to be clear, I love and would mainline right into my brain if I could) and chances are good that you’ll hear the guest of the day talk, as Nikita does, about how gossip is a crucial method by which the downtrodden transmit information among each other, unjustly rendered taboo by its sexist and patronizing association with women.

None of this is untrue. But like a lot of trendy media topics, the true power of gossip is lost in translation. All cultures have feedback loops between social standards and linguistics, and right now our language, prodded along by social media standards, prioritizes references to transaction. We are expected to explain ideas to each other in terms of material benefit: gossip is good because it allows people to find common cause by sharing information, giving them power against their oppressors.

What a sterile, anemic, stunted understanding of the glory of gossip. The implication that when we gossip we’re primarily discussing the finer points of our salaries or voting rights is cap and you know it. You’re not gossiping about how to unionize in the face of your boss’s unjust business practices, you’re gossiping about the affair he’s having with his personal assistant that neither of them thinks anyone knows about. You’re gossiping about how everyone’s least favorite coworker steals from the fridge and how their cut crease is neither mindful nor demure. Gossip is not high-minded magnanimous political discourse, it is base and snide and low. You are spilling tea. Giving dirt. Talking shit.

Didn’t none of your mamas tell you gossip is rude? Do you think she said that because she was tragically experiencing a bout of internalized sexism? Come on. Gossip is rude. It’s a social dynamic that depends on hearsay, and hearsay has as much a chance of being correct and practical as it does of being destructive and wrong. Good gossip is an art, not a science, and knowing what is and is not appropriate to yap about is a social skill gained more often than not through seeing what gets out of control and hurts people. The power of gossip, clearly, is not in its accuracy.

As anthropologists Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern write: “Rumor and gossip make up a pair of practices, closely intertwined, but belonging to different social contexts. Rumor can arise among persons who do not necessarily know one another but all become vehicles for the transmission of a specific piece of highly charged information. Gossip, however, depends on relationships, on who is talking to whom, on an interpersonal basis.”

In other words, the use of gossip is not in the content of the information we share, it’s in the people we share it with and the relationships we’re building in the process. The power of gossip is directly tied to the exclusivity of the information—the feeling, transmitted through whisper and glance, that this is sensitive information. Exclusivity indicates trust, which builds solidarity between gossiper and gossipee. Think of how good it feels to bond with someone over your shared hatred of someone else behind their back, and how much of that good feeling is tied to the relief that, at least in this situation, you’re not the one being unwittingly isolated by everyone’s secret shared contempt. Gossip is important, among women and otherwise, but the information being swapped is not the part that matters for activism, it’s the solidarity it builds. The actual information is not always, but sometimes, incorrect and harmful, and almost always trivial. Social bonds based on shared daily experiences—food, family, daily human routines— are much more durable than bonds based solely on shared injustice. The fixation on the quotidian, the “superficial,” is, in fact, what codes gossip female and marginalizes its importance in the human experience.

Social media feels like gossip because so much of it is designed to make you feel like you’re having a one-on-one interaction with someone. Nikitadumptruck appears on my screen and she’s talking to me, making eye contact with the camera. It feels like she’s FaceTimeing me. But she isn’t. She’s pre-recording a video for an audience of hundreds of thousands, and she does not know who I am. In order for yapping to count as gossip, it must, to some degree, be secret, and social media is literally the opposite of secret. Without secrecy, you’re not gossiping, you’re just indiscriminately spreading rumors.

TikTok will likely not be the last social media platform to face a restriction of some kind. That’s something to be concerned about—social media as a structure has a lot of potential both good and bad that we shouldn’t just dismiss out of hand. But let’s not let its false friendship make us forget that the main public damage of banning a social media platform is not to human communication, but to labor markets. The people hurt most by a ban of any social media platform are people who make a living off it. As someone who belongs to this category, I hope that if, for some reason, YouTube were someday banned, I would have the clarity to remember that the primary reason I’m on YouTube to begin with is that other outlets for film and writing both creative and academic have been intentionally eroded over the past few decades in favor of a highly centralized and managed corporate system—that what social media offers is not an adequate replacement for forms of communication that might be considered “less efficient,” and I should not mourn or defend a technology that exists to commodify people.

Someday, when our oil-powered grid collapses and the internet is dead and the cities are dark and we have nothing to do with our nights but talk, your great-grandchild’s aunt will have news about their cousin’s crush on the purified water delivery guy. Your great-grandchild will stare at the newly dazzling stars, smile, and feel that something matters.