I met Vitus “V” Spehar — the face behind Under the Desk News — a year ago in Washington, DC. I was on location with The Verge filming the TikTok senate hearing along with interviews with senators and content creators for a Verge video about the looming ban. And when we interviewed V outside of the Capitol, V said that TikTok was useful for channels like their own — a news channel that was started because they didn’t believe traditional news sources were accessible enough to younger audiences. V’s TikTok channel now has 3.1 million subscribers.
Every weekday, V sifts through news websites in search of six to eight stories they deem important enough to share with their audience. V then condenses each story into a bite-size snippet, crawls…