The standard explanation for why someone would trust a stranger on TikTok over a doctor, scientist, or credentialed professional is that the person is credulous. That the internet has made everyone susceptible to confidence dressed up as expertise. That careful people would simply use better sources. It is a tidy explanation. It is also, in many cases, missing the point entirely.
The missing piece is the quality of the alternative. The question is not only whether the TikTok person is reliable, but what the expert interaction actually felt like. And for a lot of people, official and credentialed communication has not felt like being informed. It has felt like being managed. Or corrected. Or addressed in a register that communicated, fairly clearly, that the questions being brought were slightly beneath serious attention.
That perception has a name and a pattern. A secondary school teacher in London, speaking to Fortune about why her students trust influencers over educators, put it plainly: “With teachers, young people think we’re just here because we’re paid to be. There’s this idea that influencers are ‘genuine’ while experts are just doing their job.” She was describing teenagers, but the dynamic she identified is not limited to teenagers. The sense that an official voice has an institutional interest in the answer it gives is not irrational. It is, in many cases, accurate.
I have noticed this in myself. Not in dramatic ways, not by replacing medical advice with viral videos. But I have found myself more engaged by someone who explained a complicated topic in plain language and seemed openly uncertain about parts of it than by a credentialed source who spoke in a register that allowed no questions and implied the matter was settled. The first felt like a conversation. The second felt like a briefing I was not really invited to participate in.
The broader shift this reflects has been well documented. Richard Edelman, CEO of the global communications firm that runs the annual Trust Barometer, described the structural change directly in the 2025 report: “Trust is traditionally conveyed from the top-down. We’ve lost that from leaders and it’s moved peer-to-peer.” The report, based on surveys across 28 countries, found government trust at its lowest in over two decades, with every category of institutional leadership showing double-digit increases in distrust compared to just a few years ago. The trust did not disappear. It moved. Sideways and downward, toward people who seemed to share the same position in the world as the person looking for information.
This is where TikTok, and platforms like it, found their opening. A 2022 study by the Reuters Institute found that 55% of young people now get their news from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram rather than traditional news outlets. That figure is about news specifically, but the pattern holds across health, finance, relationships, and any other domain where people are looking for guidance. The format that wins is not the most authoritative one. It is the one that treats the person watching as someone capable of understanding, rather than as a problem to be managed.
None of this means the TikTok stranger is right. The informal, relatable voice is not a guarantee of accuracy, and there is a well-documented record of viral advice causing real harm. The cold spoon eye trick is harmless. The skincare cream that spreads breakouts is not. The financial advice from someone whose only qualification is a ring light is a different matter still. Trusting a voice because it sounds genuine is not the same as trusting a voice because it has been tested against evidence. The two can overlap, but they do not always.
The point is not that informal sources are better. It is that the loss of trust in official ones was not inevitable. It had causes. Among them: communication that prioritized authority over clarity, that spoke in ways that discouraged follow-up questions, that treated complexity as something to be simplified into compliance rather than actually explained. People who feel talked down to do not become better informed by being told they should trust the people talking down to them. They go looking for someone who does not.
The stranger on TikTok understood something that a lot of credentialed institutions have been slow to acknowledge: that being right is not enough if the person you are trying to reach has already decided you are not talking to them. Expertise communicated as condescension tends to produce exactly the result it was trying to prevent.
