Like the wildfire conditions in Los Angeles County, my For You page on TikTok turned overnight.
I woke up last week to a phone screen filled with ravenous flames and video after video of razed homes, businesses, and other structures. Influencers broke from their regular cadence of content to film themselves packing up a suitcase for evacuation; nameless accounts shared footage from streets I didn’t recognize, showcasing the devastation; freshly created profiles asked for help locating their lost pets. Scrolling on TikTok feels like trying to keep track of 1,000 live feeds at once, each urgent and horrifying in its own way.
What all of this amounts to is a different question entirely. Even as there’s no escaping disaster content, the clips, comments, check-ins, and footage are not actually very helpful. Our feeds are awash with both too much and not enough information. Though it’s not yet clear how these fires started, scientists say that climate change will only continue to exacerbate wildfires going forward. Current weather conditions — including a severe lack of rainfall this year in Los Angeles — have created a tinderbox in the region.
Questions like “Where are the…