When kids discover their parents’ old social media
And turn it into TikToks
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
A companion to my first piece for The New York Times! —Kate
As far as I’m concerned, my parents’ lives started at age 30, when I was born. Any evidence of their lives before that is worldbuilding, not anything that actually happened. The closest their lives ever came to seeming real was when I stumbled on their yearbooks in the attic as a teen and saw pictures of them in high school and the notes their classmates scribbled across the pages.
But those memories are physically tangible, and I only saw them that one time. Parents today leave behind much more than yearbooks.
In the course of doing some reporting for my New York Times story about parents reserving social media handles for their children, I stumbled across a chilling genre of internet content: young Gen Zers discovering their parents' pasts on social media. Specifically, their Facebook accounts, which contain not just photos, but those parents’ daily thoughts, jokes, comments, and likes starting as early as 2004. A college student who joined the first iteration of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire today might have a 16-year-old who can—and probably does—look through all of it.
This has resulted in a number of trends on TikTok. Since parents who had children during peak Facebook often used the platform to post about their kids, Gen Z users have created “watch me grow up through my mom/dad’s Facebook” videos, presenting a slideshow of the photos that their parents posted of them online.
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“Finding someone’s parents’ Facebook” has also become a meme—if you tell a classmate you found their parents’ Facebook, what you’re really saying is you found a bunch of old, embarrassing photos of that classmate as a child.
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Others are diving back into their parents’ digital footprints with a kind of bewildered curiosity, especially when they see a version of their parent that they don’t recognize. An 18-year-old named Lex posted on TikTok a Facebook photo she found of her father smiling at a bar. She doesn’t say when the photo was taken, but it looks like it was shot on a digital camera with flash.
“He just isn’t this happy anymore,” she wrote in the comments. “It makes me sad asf. He looked so happy back then.”
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Then there are children sharing old Facebook photos of their parents so commenters can hype them up.
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Gen Z have more awareness, if not understanding, of their parents’ earlier lives than any generation prior, and it’s all thanks to social media. This will only be more true for Gen Alpha: Vlogs, Twitter rants, Instagram posts, and more will be available for hours and hours of perusing, and easy to come back to at any given moment, prompting some awkward conversations. Oh, I can’t start drinking until I’m 21? The 80 blurry Instagram pictures of you in college say otherwise.
For my future child looking up my Facebook, I’ll just get ahead of this now. This was, uh, water:
