What are gossip blinds, the 00s celebrity tip-offs getting a new TikTok resurgence?

Over the past few years, tabloid trashery has undergone a reckoning. Treatment of celebrities in print in the early 2000s, especially young women like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse, has had a more microscopic lens held up to it, forcing us all to reconsider how we consumed the lives of the rich and famous and at what cost. But while we started taking the glossies to task, a lesser-known underbelly of celebrity tip-offs has continued to thrive and has reached a new level of public resurgence thanks to TikTok – gossip blinds. 

If you search the term #gossipblinds on TikTok, more than 9.5 billion results turn up. A scan through the videos will show people reading out and deciphering ‘blind items’ about certain celebrities. Pooled from a network of unnamed sources, industry insiders or submissions from users, ‘blinds’ are usually one or two lines with clues written almost entirely in code detailing a shocking rumour about someone that isn't public knowledge yet. 

For example: “This married A-list actor is hooking up with this A-list tween actress turned A-/B+ list adult actress”. 

The names are masked with identifiers so as to eschew any legal ramifications of defaming a celebrity, but with enough identifying features so that followers can easily make a guess of who it's about. In the case of the above, which came from one of the original gossip blind websites Crazy Days and Nights in July 2022, many believe the code to be referring to Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Joey King, who starred alongside each other in last year's Bullet Train. 

Whether or not the blind speaks to any truth (and let's be clear, as of right now it is entirely considered a rumour) doesn't really matter, because TikTok got a hold of it and now the assertion that Aaron Taylor-Johnson cheated on his wife Sam Taylor-Johnson has gone viral, racking up over a million views by self-confessed “gossip activist” Kyle Marisa Roth and migrating over to Twitter where it trended globally. 

Gossip blinds actually date back to the late 19th Century, when riddles printed in newly-founded gossip magazines aired out the dirty laundry of New York's elite. The format of concealing names through code existed throughout the 20th Century, ushering in the forefathers of modern gossip columnists and even being an instrumental tool in historical events like the Hollywood Communist Blacklist. 

Now, however, they're most closely associated with the mid-late 2000s and the emergence of blog culture. The boom in blogs meant the likes of Perez Hilton became a celebrity in their own right for scouring the underbelly of Hollywood like a truffle pig, while others, like Crazy Days and Nights, Lainey Gossip, Blind Gossip and now-defunct Tumblr accounts took the more anonymous route of making their tip-offs the star of the show. 

Blinds fell out of public consciousness after the cannibalization of blogs in the 2010s and we migrated to central social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For the first time, celebrities took their narratives into their own hands by shutting down rumours before they could even be printed. Gossip became uncouth, something only the shameless and conspiratorial among us trafficked in.

But gossip blinds sometimes do end up being true, including Hollywood-shattering revelations around Harvey Weinstein's abuses and celebrities in the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein that littered blogs for years. For the first time, the facade of tabloid media was cracked and their complicity in covering up stories for the rich and powerful became unavoidable. Suddenly, all bets were off in terms of how much sordidness could actually be taking place without us being allowed to know. 

That fact was reiterated during a gossip blind pandemic resurgence thanks to DeuxMoi, the Instagram account trafficking in pooled submissions from followers about celebrity scoops that follows a similar riddle-like structure in its tips. Though their bread and butter are celeb sightings and secret relationships, they also became the first place to expose Armie Hammer and the multiple accusations of sexual assault that led to his career implosion. A once-reviled form of gossip-mongering became centre-stage in a fight against Hollywood men abusing their power. 

Followers of gossip blinds see their existence as a democratisation of celebrity news, a window into the real underbelly of the elite which only takes a little bit of deciphering and community brainstorming to access. TikTok, then, has been a natural home to platform those discussions as it increasingly becomes a platform for micro-experts to harness dedicated followers. Accounts like Roth's and Fluently Forward (who has a podcast also dedicated to explaining blinds off the back of its success) decipher the codes so we don't have to. The popularity of the platform also hit a peak during the pandemic, when the gap between celebrities and normal people became starkly evident. 

There's an argument to be made that the boom in conspiracy theories hitting the mainstream and the lack of media literacy overall when it comes to misinformation online has been a prime breeding ground for gossip blinds to re-emerge as a cultural force. With mistrust for the media machine at an all-time high, and a more tuned-in understanding of the symbiotic relationship between celebrities and good PR, the question now isn't ‘why should we believe these rumours?’ but ‘why shouldn’t we believe them?'. The fact of the matter is that things that have appeared in blinds in the past have come true, so for many, there's safety in believing until proven wrong. 

Gossip at its core is about community, as it needs to be shared to thrive. A buy-in from the masses ensures its survival and what better way for that to happen than in a social media ecosystem built on viral moments and hot takes? Gossip blinds never went away, but thanks to TikTok their ongoing cultural relevance is now all but secured.