Welcome to the ‘Borax Challenge’

Among the fistfuls of reporting threads I’ve kept gripping over the years are two topics that recently converged in a TikTok story: health misinformation online and viral challenges. Welcome to the “borax challenge,” where people are drinking borax in water

The children’s show ‘Bluey’ is a balm for stressed, child-free adults

At the end of 2022, during a very stressful time in my life, I started getting an avalanche of videos from a wholesome children’s show on my TikTok For You Page. This is how I accidentally became a fan of

The porcelain challenge didn’t need to be real to get views

I’ve written about a million stories over the years about the way in which moral panics about teen challenges get attention online and in mainstream media. In this iteration, I interviewed a TikTok creator who completely made up the “porcelain

Dementia content gets billions of views on TikTok. Whose story does it tell?

This story of mine is the one I’m proudest of among everything I wrote in 2022. It’s about going viral, consent, and cognitive decline. There’s a lot written about the huge consent issues raised by “sharenting” culture and parents who