Each age brings a new format for speculating about celebrity affairs, and over the decades, gossip has found new ways to justify its own existence. In recent years, the nastiness that marked early-aughts gossip has seemed retrograde. But the pursuit of sensitive gossip might be a vain one.

On TikTok, users “emojify” their faces — abstracting facial expressions into blank, universal icons that nonetheless provide a hit of personality, and estranging the most basic and embodied mode of communication from the body