Biography
Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist and content creator credited for pioneering journalism on TikTok.
Sophia’s push for using TikTok as an investigative tool and publishing platform for journalists has won her a series of accolades, including the British Journalism Awards’ Innovation of the Year in 2021, a spot on the Forbes Under 30 List and recognition in British Vogue as one of the 25 most influential women in the UK in 2022. Her videos have been seen over 160 million times on TikTok and Instagram alone.
Her exclusive reporting across health and technology has led to platform changes everywhere from TikTok to the NHS website, and her journalism around sexual and reproductive health has led to the exposure of British anti-abortion funding as well as the UK government’s secret withdrawal of millions of pounds of sex education funding. She was the first journalist to report the misuse of political ads on TikTok during the 2020 US election, which was broadcast in her first television documentary The TikTok Election, and she continues to hold the same platform she goes viral on every week to account in a series of ongoing investigations.
She joined the BBC in 2017 and worked across BBC News and the BBC World Service, becoming the network’s first ever Visual Journalist in Faith & Ethics. She became a Senior News Reporter for VICE News in 2021 as well as a Fellow at Brown University’s Information Futures Lab. She is now freelance.
Sophia co-hosts the BBC World Service’s flagship wellbeing podcast Where To Be A Woman and she runs Sophina, an AI tool she invented to help journalists and researchers turn their work into viral video scripts. She appears regularly across British and US media as an expert on social media.
In 2022, her first book debunking sex misinformation, Losing It, was published by Harper Collins. It is recommended reading from the IPPF and was spotlit in 2022 at the World Health Organization’s annual summit in Berlin.
Contact information:
For personal, journalism and media innovation enquiries – as well as tips for stories – email Sophia.
For television, radio, social media and speaking requests, email Helena Bumpus at Noel Gay.
For literary works, email Emma Smith at Wylie.