“How can I be prettier?” 25-year-old Teala asked an infinite potential of strangers. “Be brutally honest,” she insisted. “I don’t want compliments.” It might sound like an unconventional plan, and one that takes balls of steel, but Teala isn’t the only one up to it. She’s one of many young women taking to asking strangers online how they can improve their looks, through the means of TikTok. #howcanIbeprettier has over 46M views on the app while #howcanilookprettierbebrutallyhonest has 3M. For Te...

Twenty-seven-year-old Erica Kathleen regularly finds herself making private TikTok videos in the middle of the night to " manifestation sounds ". She never posts the videos and says she wishes she didn’t have to make them but the obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) she’s had for the past decade makes her feel it’s impossible not to. OCD is an exhausting mental health condition that is made up of hugely misunderstood obsessions and compulsions, both external (like having to complete a task a set

The desire to be tanned online is driving a new generation of people to their local sunbed shops, where they film the process for millions The viewers are getting ready with an influencer as she decides what to wear to head to the sunbed shop. She picks loose-fitting clothing, she tells the camera, because she always feels sick after a sunbed. Elsewhere, a different influencer sprays a “triple-strength” watermelon-flavoured tan accelerator up her nose at her dressing table before putting her ha

A new wave of dating and relationship gurus are advocating optimism and the joys of being delusional on TikTok.

A photographer captured the heartwrenching scene of strollers left by Polish families ready for the arrival of Ukrainian moms leaving their home country with their babies, in a now-viral image. Photojournalist Francesco Malavolta has been documenting the current refugee crisis at the borders of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary over the last 12 days. In a scene that has since spread online, Malavolta captured a heartbreaking moment of humanity on March 3, as donated strollers lined Przemysl train s

Fears of a growing "Kool-Aid Man" TikTok challenge have been growing across the U.S., as reports emerge of broken fences causing thousands of dollars' worth damage—but there's little to suggest it's even a TikTok challenge at all. TikTok conducted its own investigation into the apparent trend and found no evidence of its existence on the app. One police department, who previously believed it to have been a TikTok challenge, confirmed to Newsweek that it wasn't. Last week, Massillon Police Depa...

Lucy’s honesty might come as a shock, but she regularly informs 30,000 people about her stealing habit via @ferretsborrowing, a TikTok account she runs. What started out as a way to share a glittery PowerPoint she made for a friend on how to shoplift is now part of what is known as “Borrowing TikTok”. This isn’t the first online community of shoplifters. In 2014, a Tumblr user “outed” a relatively smaller group of accounts that were also detailing their hauls and tips. But according to those in

Cindy Smock has 300,000 followers on TikTok. Gen Z loves her. She has iconic catchphrases and is asked for selfies wherever she goes. But Smock isn't an L.A. teen doing the "Renegade" in her content creator house. She's a 63-year-old evangelical Christian campus preacher from Indiana. "Welcome to Sister Cindy's Slut-Shaming Show," she says in one of the many videos that catapulted her to TikTok fame. After finding that college students had been sharing videos online from Cindy and her husband B

“Some people started to find out about where I was working and they started to form their own opinions about it," Cristina Villegas begins. "I wanted to take control of my own narrative so I decided to start vlogging my work experiences to show what it is really like and to set the record straight on assumptions that were made about me." Cristina started stripping at 18, and making videos about it a year later in 2018. She now has over one million subscribers, and she's a veritable trailblazer i