Do social media videos have captions or subtitles? And what's the difference?

Those words across the bottom of the screen when you’re watching a TikTok – what do you call them? For some people they’re subtitles, for others they’re captions. You might also know them as Closed Captions – that’s what the little CC button means on some video players. But why are they closed? Why is this all so confusing?

Lets start with the cold, hard definitions and usage.

Subtitles

Usually seen in cinema and TV, subtitles are translations of dialogue, primarily intended for viewers who don’t speak the production language of the movie or show.

Image generated by DALL·E. Prompt:

A screenshot from a crime drama film featuring two detectives. They are framed in a dimly-lit police station with lots of desks with paperwork. They are in deep conversation as the sun sets outside the window and pink/purple light streams in the window. In a realistic cartoon style.

Ever watched a Chinese kung-fu movie, or a moody nordic crime thriller? You were reading subtitles. Subtitling is the classier sibling of dubbing, which replaces original dialogue with the voice of actors speaking lines in a different language.

The connoisseurs among us will prefer subtitles, as it preserves the screen actors’ original performance while still letting us understand what’s going on.

English-language consumers may not be too familiar with subtitled films – because the majority of the film production and consumption is in English. Despite English being spoken by about 20% of the world’s population, English-language movies accounted for almost 70% of the market in 2023. Logically, this means in non-English-speaking countries subtitled movies are very common. In Spanish-speaking countries, it’s common to see film names suffixed with VOSE, meaning Versión Original Subtitulada en Español, or “Original Version with Spanish Subtitles”.

Captions

While the primary purpose of subtitles is to translate language, captions build on subtitles to provide a written description of all audio for viewers who cannot hear what’s going on.

So if you’ve ever been watching a Netflix show with subtitles on and seen phrases like [suspenseful music continues], you’re actually using captions!

Captions will also usually denote who is speaking, and describe extra auditory details that aren’t visually apparent, like thunder rolling in the background or cars approaching. Try watching your favorite show with the audio muted and captions on, and you’ll quickly get a feel for how useful they are.

Image generated by DALL·E. Prompt:

Another shot from the same movie, featuring the same characters, visual style and lighting. This time the characters are pursing a suspect down an alleyway with smoke rising from a manhole cover. The female detective has her gun drawn.

Closed vs open

Closed captions may be familiar to you, but did you know subtitles can also be closed? And, in fact, open! Closed and open simply describes the way the captions or subtitles are added to whatever you’re watching.

If you can turn them on and off, they’re closed. If they’re a part of the video itself (similar to the title screen or the credits), then they’re open. This is sometimes described as “burned-in”, because they cannot be removed. This method is often used in movies where small amounts of dialogue are in a different language – the viewer doesn’t want to see subtitles the whole time, but it’s important they understand what’s happening when someone switches to another language (usually the villain, for dramatic effect!).

What about TikTok, Insta and YouTube?

Most social videos are consumed with the sound off, so it’s logical to add subtitles. But, this is where things get messy.

Image generated by DALL·E. Prompt:

Another scene from the same movie with the same lighting and characters. The detectives are arresting a suspect, a thin white male, on a bridge overlooking a river with the city in the background. The male detective is asking the suspect questions while the female detective puts him in handcuffs. Behind them is a police car with sirens flashing.

One of TikTok’s most famous features is auto captions, launched in 2021, which uses voice recognition to convert dialogue to text and add it to your videos. But if you’ve ever watched a TikTok with captions, you’ll know it’s only dialogue being added. So, actually, they’re subtitles. And, by the way, they’re non-removable, so TikTok captions are actually open subtitles.

It’s a similar story on Instagram, where the captions sticker also provides open subtitles – it doesn’t describe any other audio details.

YouTube, meanwhile, is a complete mess. Voice recognition is used to generate subtitles which is called “automatic captioning”, but is controlled in a YouTube Studio section called “subtitles”, and can be toggled on and off using the player button labelled “Subtitles / Closed Captions”. Hey, at least they got the closed part right!

With AI person, object and action recognition for video improving leaps and bounds in the last few years, its possible we may soon get to a point where actual captions can be generated for digital video, but for now the feature most social networks refer to as “captions” is actually subtitles.

Of course, for the majority of people subtitles and captions are used interchangeably, especially in the context of TikTok and Instagram Reels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact there’s a school of thought that the increasing prevalence of social subs has contributed to an increase in adoption of captions and subtitles in long-form content). But, we should always keep in mind that captions were originally introduced to help the deaf or hard of hearing enjoy TV and movies, and have a specific meaning for those groups of people.