This Group Has Helped Millions Recover From Addiction. TikTok Is Rewriting Its Rules.

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In 1960 Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and author of his famous 12 Steps, did something that would be unthinkable in today's attention economy: He declined an invitation to be on the cover of Time magazine.

The editors offered a compromise: What if Wilson were pictured with him back to the camera, making him unidentifiable? Again, he refused. Such advertising was out of the question for any AA member, not just its architect. Enshrined in the program he'd co-founded in 1935 was the mandate outlined in the ^11th Tradition—that AA's members “need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”

Wilson believed that public anonymity would inoculate the organization against members' exploitation of AA for personal or professional gain and keep it free from controversy and embarrassment. Maintaining “100 percent personal anonymity” was vital to the future of the group, he argued . Without it, the damage to the organization could be “irreparable.” Anonymity is so important that it's codified in the ^12th Tradition as “the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”

I got sober in 2008, and for the first six years, I was an active member of AA. While I'm no longer involved in the Program, as it's often called, I'm still fascinated by AA's history and societal impact. It's a 90-year-old organization, and not a word of the Program's core—the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions—has changed since Wilson published it. This consistency is one of the reasons that, despite the boom in support and treatment options for people with alcoholism (the severe end of what clinicians now call alcohol use disorder), Alcoholics Anonymous is still the largest and best known of the bunch.

What has changed is the delineation between public and private, who can broadcast their innermost lives to the world, and whose innermost lives garner the world's interest. These shifts prompt the question: What constitutes personal anonymity in a world where the line between personal and public is vanishing?

Contrary to Wilson's assertions , there have always been AA members who publicly identify themselves, most often celebrities in recovery (Robin Williams, Elton John, and Liza Minnelli, to name a few). It makes sense: Who inhabits “press, radio, and films” more than the rich and famous? Sticklers for adhering to the letter of AA's program have always grumbled about these types of high-profile disclosures, but most of the people I've spoken to in AA exhibit a more nonchalant “Hollywood's gonna Hollywood” attitude about it.

But the proliferation of social media and influence culture changed all that. In a 2024 piece for the New Yorker, Chris Hayes writes that with the help of a handful of tech firms, it took us only a decade to destroy millennia of “maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private.”

The lines that had once been carved in laws and norms are obsolete in the eyes of an algorithm designed to lure you into the performative intimacies of strangers' lives. Movie stars, politicians, and rock legends aren't the only people with millions of followers.

This level of digital interconnectedness would have been unfathomable to AA's founders. It would take 55 years after the program's establishment for the first web browser to be developed, and nearly 70 years for Facebook to launch. For many in AA, the media landscape is irrelevant—it's the principles that matter. For example, Brad, an active member of AA for 15 years, tells me that for him, the ^11th Tradition is about humility and that “we should strive to maintain the principles as we adapt to a changing environment rather than ask if the principle still applies.”

There's no doubt that many other members feel similarly. The organization's refusal to change from its founding precepts is what makes those precepts sacrosanct to some and archaic to others. In 2013 its General Service Office, the communications hub for AA in the United States and Canada, tried to address these technological developments, arguing that the answer is already outlined in the 12 Traditions. It stated that “the Internet, social media, and all forms of public communications are implicit” in the ^11th Tradition's use of “press, radio, and films.”

To be clear, I'm talking only about voluntary, personal self-disclosure. The other kind of anonymity in AA is group anonymity, best embodied by the chant recited at the end of many AA meetings: “Who you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.” Protecting others' anonymity is among the least controversial aspects of the organization—and among the most palatable to those who seek out its support nearly 100 years later. Long before the ubiquity of the phrase safe space , a group of middle-aged white men in the 1930s and '40s was fully committed to the idea.

But the profound cultural shift regarding public and private spheres is, at its core, about self -identification. As in nondigital spaces, the motivation behind that self-identification can be born from a genuine desire to share and connect with others, or it can be ego-driven. Social media makes both more accessible but incentivizes only the latter.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on TikTok, an app dominated by Gen Z, the generation that grew up with social media. As one scrolls through hundreds of thousands of videos with tags related to Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups, it immediately becomes clear that everything Bill Wilson worried about when it came to breaking personal anonymity at the public level is on full display.

There are hundreds of videos purporting to be the authority on what AA says, videos dictating how a person in AA should behave, stories of relapses, videos blaming AA for those relapses, skits about AA meetings, angry videos about every possible AA-related controversy, and videos of people seemingly auditioning to be America's next top sober influencer.

Although I haven't been involved in AA in over a decade and openly write about my experience in the Program, I instinctively felt sort of scandalized by how blatant the personal “anonymity breaking” was. The disclosures were so pervasive and unabashed that they made me realize that the question is not whether “personal anonymity at the public level” still makes sense in 2025 but rather what it means that so many have entirely abandoned it.

It's not simply that the media ecosystem is infinitely more complex than when it could be summed up as “press, radio, and films”; it's that the space Alcoholics Anonymous occupies in society has similarly been transformed. In the early years of its existence, there were only two AA meetings in the world: one in Brooklyn and the other in Akron, Ohio. Today there are groups in 180 countries; it's the world's largest peer-led mutual aid organization for people with alcohol use disorder.

AA's ubiquity has resulted in countless depictions of 12-step recovery on-screen, an entire subgenre of “quit lit” memoirs, podcasts, and celebrity interviews. It has even, controversially, become a staple of drug courts, with offenders sentenced to attend AA meetings. It's hard to argue that any of this exposure has materially damaged the organization. AA's language still dictates personal anonymity at the public level, but for many people, their involvement just doesn't feel like a secret that needs to be kept.

For others, keeping secrets at all feels like a slippery slope. “When I was drinking, I kept secrets about where I was going and what I was doing,” Jason, a 27-year-old in the Program, tells me. “It's not something I want to do now that I'm sober. People are so much more open about mental health stuff now. Why shouldn't we talk about the things that help us?”

As with any shade of wellness influencer, there are real risks associated with a large platform in questionable hands. You don't have to venture far into #sobertok to find it. AA has always been polarizing, and there's nothing a social media algorithm loves more than polarization. Whether the videos are anti-AA or pro-AA, many are full of misinformation, reductive characterizations, evangelism, rage bait, and wannabe spiritual gurus.

Such videos may be off-putting and misleading to viewers looking for more nuance. There's also a risk that some might feel pressured to share more than they're comfortable with. In a 2023 study published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry , researchers looked at YouTube videos about substance use and determined that videos posted by creators with lived experiences in recovery received high levels of positive engagement.

But hand-wringing about the potential downsides doesn't change the fact that many are already turning to TikTok to share their experiences in AA. In a 2021 study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence , researchers reviewed 82 of the most liked TikTok videos about attempts to cut down substance use or maintain recovery. They found that 70 percent referred to participation in Alcoholics Anonymous.