The video is rarely the point anymore.
We watch it, sure — but almost immediately, we scroll. Straight past the creator, straight past the caption, straight into the comments. That’s where the real story is. The decoding. The side-eye. The quiet consensus forming line by line.
TikTok has become the group chat for women — not the one where you plan dinner, but the one where you send screenshots and type, “Is it just me, or…?”
It’s where you go to check a feeling before you commit to it.
I realised this recently after striking up an unlikely friendship with a woman I’d never met. Our common ground wasn’t work, geography or overlapping social circles — it was a shared reaction to a newspaper article. Specifically, a piece in The Times, written by Peter Mandelson, in which he attempted to — depending on your tolerance for revisionism — vindicate himself.
The article did what many articles like it do. It presented a version of events that felt tidy, reflective, resolved. What it didn’t do was convince many women reading it.
The real conversation didn’t happen beneath the article itself. It happened elsewhere — on TikTok — where women dissected it with surgical calm. Not outrage. Not pile-on energy. Just a collective, almost weary recognition of a familiar manoeuvre: accountability softened into explanation, reflection framed as closure.
We didn’t need to know each other to agree. We simply found each other in the comments.
This is the role TikTok plays now. It doesn’t just circulate content; it processes it. Publicly. In real time. With footnotes.
You see it most clearly in the videos that don’t even pretend to be novel anymore. Avoidant attachment clips drift across your screen — again — and before the creator has finished the sentence, the comments have already taken over. Women narrating the same heartbreaks, the same emotional arithmetic, the same dawning realisation that this isn’t a personal failing so much as a shared pattern.
The video opens the door. The comments rearrange the furniture.
This isn’t trend participation. It’s collective meaning-making. And it’s happening because trust — in traditional media, in polished narratives, in authoritative explanations — feels thinner than it used to.
Not gone. Just earned differently.
