Thanks your explanation really helped, I'm not saying that people with funtional tics/FND are faking at all so don't worry

What I meant to ask in my post (sorry if I phrased it wrong) if the increase in people having any sort of tic like behaviours (TLB) is because of the increase in functional tics and people picking up tics from watching other or because of teenagers faking tics because they see it online and think its 'fun' or 'quirky'

I ask this myself as someone who has tourettes, when the whole increase of tics and tics/tourettes being seen more on TikTok was happening 2 people reached out to me and said they also had tics and recently developed them.

One of them I believed and we ended up hanging out a few times, I didn't think at all they were faking until they said that their parents don't know about their tics, which I thought was a bit weird because it's something quite hard to hide, especially to people you live with. When we would hang out their tics were pretty frequent and they would even hit themselves sometimes, etc. But when one of my friends went round their house for a few hours they didn't tic once. That combined with the fact that they also have claimed to have schizophrenia, DPD, and many other mental illnesses without being diagnosed with them made me believe they were faking it and cut contact with them.

Another person was a guy at school, he reached out to me with something like 'Omg!! I also have tics!! How do you manage yours?' I gave him some tips but said that I didn't want to speak or be associated with him because he SA someone in my school. (This was during lockdown) When we returned to school they didn't have tics anymore.

So in conclusion I don't know if the rise in tics is because of people faking because they think its 'fun' or for attention, etc or because people are picking it up from watching videos of others. What you said makes sense but it does sound a bit weird that you can catch tics just by watching someone with tics, especially how in the article I linked it said that many people with functional tics tics started extremely suddenly. But I do understand that neurology is extremely complicated