Many young adults get their investing information from social media. The algorithm decides whether it's any good.

Among U.S. retail investors aged 18 to 34, 60% use social media or online message boards to inform their investment decisions and 61% report acting on a recommendation from a social media personality, according to an April 2026 brief from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation.[1] Across investors of all adult ages, the figures are 29% and 26%, so the behavior concentrates in the youngest group.[1] For young adults, the social media feed has become a primary source of financial information. The troubling trend is that the feed sorts what a person sees by engagement, not by whether it is correct or legitimate.

A recommendation engine is not built to separate a careful research thesis from a stock promoter rewarded by engagement. TikTok and Instagram rank posts by what holds a user's attention. On one platform, a person can follow an account that explains a Federal Reserve decision accurately and another account selling a "guaranteed-return" course, which is one of the oldest red flags in investment fraud. FINRA tested exactly that: offered a guaranteed, risk-free 25% annual return, 50% of investors said they would invest.[1] The social interfaces do little to mark which of the two is more verifiable.

Searching for "verified financial influencers" on the social platforms does not close the discovery gap. A money question typed into a social platform returns individual videos and hashtags ranked by engagement rather than a list of people who know the subject, and little in that ranking reports who has been right before.

The verification layer that a library catalog or a citation index provides has no real equivalent on a social platform, so reaching the genuinely educational accounts usually requires knowing their social tags or account names in advance. Discovery runs on what a person already knows to look for, so exposure to good financial media ends up unevenly distributed, the same way classroom quality and financial knowledge at home already are, as discussed in our prior notes.

What a missing verification layer costs is not hypothetical, and it reaches past investing advice into ordinary banking. One stark example: In late August 2024, videos spread across TikTok and X promoting what they called an "infinite money glitch": write yourself a check for more than your balance, deposit it at a Chase ATM, then withdraw cash before the check bounced.[2] What the videos called a glitch was check fraud of an old and specific kind: exploiting the float between a deposit and the moment the check clears, the mechanism bankers call check kiting. Chase said so plainly, that depositing a fraudulent check and withdrawing the funds is "fraud, plain and simple."[2]

On October 28, 2024, JPMorgan Chase filed four complaints in federal court against account holders who had done it, seeking more than $660,000 combined.[3] The bank said it was cooperating with law enforcement and had referred cases for criminal review.[4]

The videos packaged an alleged felony as a "life hack." A financial professional can be bound by a fiduciary duty to put the client's interest first. An influencer is measured by engagement, and content that doesn't earn views doesn't get made.

The Chase case is visible because someone filmed it. The pattern underneath is measurable, and it is not a portrait of lazy investors. Social media users reported drawing on 7.6 information sources on average, against 4.0 for non-users, and were more than twice as likely to check a financial professional's background with a regulator, 36% against 14%.[1] But social media users still scored lower on FINRA's investment quiz than non-users and, when targeted by a scam, lost money at more than twice the rate.[1] Effort spent inside a social channel that doesn't sort for accuracy raises confidence without raising judgment, which is a bad combination for someone deciding where to put their money.

The pull of these social platforms is real and worth taking seriously. Nearly half of social media users and "finfluencer" followers said they don't see themselves as a "typical investor," and they named entertainment (59% of social media users against 18% of non-users), social connection (59% against 11%), and personal values (66% against 31%) as reasons to invest.[1]

The honest response is neither to trust the algorithm to sort teachers from sellers nor to pretend static textbook-type material will hold a teenager who checks their feed many times a day.

The real work is to build what the feed does well, content that is current, specific, and genuinely engaging, together with what the feed leaves to chance, accuracy and structure, so that being engaging and being verified stop pulling in opposite directions.

That's what FinBizify is built to do: business and personal finance education that stays relevant and focused on real companies and real dollar figures, engaging enough to hold attention on the same phone the algorithm runs on, and more accountable for being verifiable.

The feed already won distribution. What it hasn't settled is whether being informed and being right point the same way.

Sources

1. K. Jeremy Ko, Sarah Green, Gary R. Mottola and Olivia Valdes, "Finfluencer Followers and Social Media Scrollers: The Profile, Patterns and Pitfalls of Social-Media-Informed Retail Investors," FINRA Investor Education Foundation, April 2026. Based on the Investor Survey component of the 2024 National Financial Capability Study (n=2,861). Adoption figures for ages 18-34 are in the Introduction; channel shares are Figure 1; knowledge figures are Figure 4; fraud-loss figures are Figure 8 and cover only investors who reported being targeted; information-source and non-monetary-motive figures are in the Information Sources and Non-Monetary Motives sections. https://finrafoundation.org/sites/finrafoundation/files/2026-03/FINRA_Foundation_Research_Brief_Social_Media_Finfluencers.pdf

2. Julia Glum, "This Chase Bank 'Glitch' Went Viral on TikTok. It Was Fraud," Money, Sept. 3, 2024. Source for the scheme mechanics, the TikTok and X spread, and the Chase spokesperson statement quoted here. https://money.com/chase-money-glitch-fraud/

3. Dan Ennis, "JPMorgan Chase sues customers who exploited viral 'glitch'," Banking Dive, Oct. 29, 2024. Four complaints filed Oct. 28, 2024 in three federal district courts. The article itemizes the four sums sought, $290,939.49, $141,295.84, $138,680.91 and $90,794.02, totaling $661,710.26. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/jpmorgan-chase-lawsuits-against-glitch-users-wire-fraud-viral-atm-deposit/731377/

4. "Chase Bank Formally Sues Viral 'Infinite Money' Glitch Participants," Money, Oct. 2024. Source for Chase cooperating with law enforcement and referring cases for criminal litigation. The four actions described above are civil suits; no criminal conviction tied to the trend has been reported. https://money.com/chase-infinite-money-glitch-lawsuits/