TikTok Becomes a News Platform More and More

There is more to TikTok than lip sync, challenges, and cats. For many users, TikTok is increasingly becoming a news hub, as the most important events make it to the platform. This is both good and bad news for TikTok: the new interest of audience means new concerns the platform has to deal with, preventing misinformation from spreading.

According to the recent research by Pew Research Center, TikTok becomes a source of news for about 10% of its users. This doesn’t seem much, but still it disrupts the image of TikTok as a purely entertaining platform. For American users under 30, the percentage is 26; this can be related to the users they follow or to the fact they spend more time on TikTok in general, so news videos have better chances of making it to their feeds. An even greater number, about a third of all the adult users surveyed, say they use TikTok as a source of news.

In the meantime, other platforms (like Facebook, viewed traditionally as “dad’s social media”) become less important when it comes to news. For example, in 2020, about 54% of Americans used Facebook to learn about important events; now the number has decreased to 44%. YouTube is stagnant as a news source, 33% of its users watching it for news.

This effect can also be attributed to mass media accommodating to new media formats. Making vertical videos optimized for smartphones is not the art to give all your life; it can be mastered easily, and the quest for audience couldn’t ignore such a platform.

sers repost the videos about the events they consider important, they comment them and share their opinion. Sometimes eyewitnesses happen to post some story on TikTok almost in real time, before news sites and newspapers catch on.

Logically, this makes a good soil for misinformation and misleading stories, and TikTok is concerned about it as well. It has already taken some measures for containing it, but not sufficient, as about 20% of news-related videos are still found to be misinformative.

Do you watch news on TikTok? Where do you find reliable sources? Share some channels in the comments if you like, or just say what you think about it!