This story was originally published on the Daily Dot.
In October, news of John Mulaney and Olivia Munn’s alleged split was announced not in a breaking tweet from TMZ or by a popular gossip account, but via a visibly sick man on TikTok. He’d reportedly seen a blind item on the Deuxmoi subreddit, asked some industry friends to confirm, then took to TikTok to “break” the news. The couple never directly commented on the rumor, and they shared photos of their newborn son in December.
TikTok is the new pipeline for gossip and blind items. Over the last two years, the pandemic made many of us more hyper-focused on celebrity, or finding clues in posts. But how gossip is distributed has evolved, and a community grew on TikTok that presented it in a more relatable, digestible way. There’s a move away from the anonymous blind-item model and toward a crowdsourced, personal one. …
