My week of social media conspiracies

The fake news is coming from inside the house.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Conspiracies aren’t the only consequence of the TikTok “ban.” Now, a number of influencers who participated in a trend spilling their (sometimes career-ruining) secrets before the app went down are left picking up the pieces. All this on Saturday’s ep!

— Kate

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Last weekend, I was upstate with some friends on a ski trip (or rather, they were skiing—I fell down a bunch and then spent the rest of the day in the lodge on my phone) when the TikTok “ban” went into effect, and I became the defacto spokesperson for what was going on to this group of mostly-offline individuals. I was in my element. I broke down the ban, what TikTok was doing, and how I thought it would change social media. I then floated a theory that had emerged during my last few days of scrolling: Meta was buying TikTok.

I showed these friends the evidence: Mainly, that TikTok itself didn’t seem to be panicking and that Instagram had just updated its grid displays from squares to rectangles. Plus, it just felt right to me. Why wouldn’t the rivalry between Reels and TikTok end with the two great powers consolidating? I sat back, smug in my wisdom. Of course, I was embarrassingly wrong.

It turns out I had fallen for a conspiracy—one of many that cropped up last week as it became clear that the social media platforms we’ve called home for the past 10 years have been usurped by the Trump administration. Now, we’re on the lookout for ways Trump’s influence may be already tarnishing our feeds and finding it in all the wrong places. You’ve probably heard a lot of these yourself, so let’s do some debunking.