Marissa Meizz was out to dinner with a friend when her phone started vibrating. It was an unusually frenzied buzz, unresponsive to the silence button – a flood of texts from friends, acquaintances and even an “offline” aunt all linking to a TikTok video titled “Send this to Marissa in NYC”.

She froze. Then she started watching.

“I hate to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong,” said the uploader, @Drewbdoobdoo, smiling gleefully. “But if your name is Marissa, listen up.” Drew recounted overhearing a group of girlfriends within earshot of his perch in a New York City park. They were chatting about how they had purposely chosen a weekend to throw a birthday party when their friend Marissa was out of town – a clear violation of the friend code. “I need to tell you that the weekend you’re away is not the only time they could do their birthday party,” Drew said. “TikTok, help me find Marissa.”

Meizz knew instantly: “This is about me.” She was devastated.

Similar videos – in which uploaders eavesdrop on strangers and report the “tea” to their TikTok audiences, sometimes offering identifying features of all those involved – have become a curious trend on the app. Dozens of these videos are popping up under various hashtags, airing out the dirty laundry of unsuspecting parties: baby daddies with secret families, fiancés who cheated while on their bachelor trips, and friend groups complaining behind the back of an unwitting member.

The blowback is often humiliating for the person who’s being talked about.

After Meizz went on TikTok to respond to Drew, revealing that he had been talking about her, she became known as “this girl from the video”, she said. “People would recognize me on the street and be like, ‘Oh, you’re the girl with no friends.’”

In another video, Kelsey Kotzur, a lifestyle influencer, landed in the hot seat for sharing gossip she overheard at a London restaurant with her 160,000 TikTok followers. In a three-minute clip, she described what the gossipers looked like, where they were brunching, and the excruciating details of their complaints about their supposed friend – they hated her wedding, her dress, and having to participate in the event at all. The worst part: they were her bridesmaids.

“If I were that friend and I knew that these girls were talking about me like this, I would throw myself into traffic,” Kotzur said in the clip. Yet she proceeded: “If you just got married, and your color scheme was blush, and you have two blonde friends with short bobs, and you have a brunette friend, don’t be friends with them any more.” The video has been viewed over 3m times.

In this era of gossip surveillance, not only are TikTokers policing the social lives of those around them, but they’re often doing it at the expense of the very person they are supposedly saving.

Gossip can hurt – and help

Gossip, its function and villainy, has been dissected by moralists for ages. The psychologist Dr Audrey Tang explains that gossip is a powerful form of social bonding. “Gossip recognizes the feeling of being in the in-group,” she said. “And if we’ve contributed to the conversation, we’ve even got that hit of dopamine. We’re bonding, and oxytocin” – the natural hormone that emits loving feelings – “is being released.”

Though salacious on its surface, scandal-driven gossip can also “point out things that break social codes”, said Dr Andrea McDonnell, a professor of communication at Providence College and author of A Gossip Politic. “These videos are a manifestation of one of the things that gossip has always done, which is to police bad behavior.”

We saw this in the 2010s with “Twitter, do your thing”, shorthand urging users to hunt, expose and punish wrongdoers caught on video. These threads were dedicated to the comeuppance of racists, abusers and criminals. But now, years later, outing gossip perpetrators in the sacred space of the brunch table may be pushing the boundaries of ethical gossip.

“People need a place to vent,” Tang said. “It may feel unpalatable and it may be harsh, but sometimes you need to release emotion so that you can go back to being a good friend.”

Ultimately, Meizz is glad that the video was posted and had a positive, albeit strange, effect on her life. Nearly three years later, she has new friends, a buzzing community and a career in content creation. She even founded a social group, No More Lonely Friends. When she joined me in a park for an interview, she was eager to get back to her friends at the dive bar where they watch football every Sunday – a far cry from her days as the “girl with no friends”.

She acknowledges that her social triumph is undoubtedly an unusual outcome. Still, as aberrant as it may be, it seems to have set the rationale for this trend – that sharing privileged information in front of millions of viewers will benefit the person being talked about, even if it utterly humiliates them in the process.

When Kotzur’s video inspired uproar on behalf of the bride, she defended herself in a follow up video, explaining that she knows Meizz personally and saw how this kind of information could positively affect one’s life.

But some academics who defend gossip’s many virtues are doubtful that there is any value beyond views and clicks. Two videos by Kellie Yancy, another TikTok influencer, received a combined 20m views before she took them down. “Whoever Sarah is, your friends over there talking about you,” Yancy said in one clip. “She said you dress sleazy.” Yancy then turned the phone to face the brunching table next to her. “Hold on, I’m about to show you exactly who talking about you, Sarah.” (Kotzur and Yancy did not respond to requests for comment.)

“I’m having a hard time understanding how [this trend] could be called well-intentioned, if they’re going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people,” said the ethicist Dr Emrys Westacott.

Meizz also warned against revealing identifying details, which “can ruin lives in a deeper way”. With the details Yancy included in her video, there was enough information for keyboard sleuths to piece together Sarah’s identity and find her social media profiles. “Maybe that Sarah girl would have, like, [hurt herself],” Meizz said, her eyes widening. “People aren’t thinking about that when they post it.”

In a now deleted TikTok Live video, Yancy said that Sarah had contacted her, requesting that she take down the original video because it was affecting her job. Sarah also told Yancy that she was uncomfortable with the online hate that was being directed at those who were talking about her.

Meizz has been asked to expose her friends from Drew’s video. But “I don’t need them to get death threats,” she said.

What does ethical gossip look like?

Experts who study gossip believe that there are ways to ethically share it. In the popular podcast Normal Gossip, on which the host, Kelsey McKinney, shares gossip that listeners submit about “friends of friends”, the anonymized accounts really just become a story – a story that happens to be true. In contrast, the videos reporting on bad-mouthing passersby are focused on “inherently non-public conversations that people are engaging in”, said the technology journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online.

McDonnell agreed. “For the average person going out to dinner, we generally expect that we have a right to privacy,” she said. “Social media has brought us to a place where anybody can be paparazzi.”

The 21st century has not been kind to the personal lives of celebrities, royalty, or politicians, with print media and online sites publishing the unverified scuttlebutt of those whose lives interest us most. We watched as champagne-chugging socialites were crucified on gossip rags like TMZ and Perez Hilton in the early aughts, while nowadays, gossip accounts like Deuxmoi obsess over behind-the-scenes celebrity drama one step removed from our own.

“The line between A-lister, influencer and [someone] posting on TikTok is ever thinning,” McDonnell said. “And so talking about and reporting on other people that we interact with in everyday life as though they were celebrities becomes internalized.” There’s also often power in privileged information and knowing something first. In journalism, it might be “the scoop”, and at the brunch table it may be “the tea”.

“What’s a little disturbing about [this trend] is that it takes great pride and pleasure in presenting this information,” McDonnell said, “and that seems to supersede the feeling of sadness about how that would affect the person who’s directly implicated.”

Kotzur’s claim that she’d walk into traffic if she were the target of the very gossip she was amplifying shows she’s “anticipating the harm of the comments” – but she “publicizes them anyway. And as watchers of this type of content, we are voyeurs of that imagined harm,” McDonnell said. It can be “borderline cruel”, she added.

TikTok’s hunger for gossip surveillance is about indulging our human desire to uncover secrets about other people’s lives. But often these videos disregard the subject’s basic right to consent and privacy, in an attempt to get likes and virtue-signal to followers.

“It’s not a [public service], it’s toxic. I don’t even think of it as gossip as much as it is surveillance state shit,” Lorenz said. “It lets people feel like they’re engaging in drama that’s low stakes, but there are really consequences.”

• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org