When you are trying to stay up to date with the news, what app do you click on first? Many people would say they turn to TikTok, a popular social media app used to make short videos. Somewhere along the way, TikTok morphed into a place where people go to find out what’s happening in the world.
The number of young adults who use TikTok as a main source for their news has had a large spike.
Studies from Pew Research Center show that 1 in 5 American adults get their news from TikTok. This is a large jump from 3% in 2020. Around 40% of adults under the age of thirty say they regularly get their news from TikTok, compared to 9% in 2020.
With these numbers continuing to rise, it raises the question of when TikTok will become a main news source.
Using social media to stay informed isn’t a bad thing. It’s how you navigate it that can turn it from a negative into a positive. TikTok makes news very accessible.
You can learn about a new event in less than a minute instead of having to sit down and watch the news or read a whole article. For younger people, this makes staying up to date much easier and more convenient.
TikTok is unregulated; influencers posting don’t have to give you the right information. They don’t have to give you proof, and they have no boss who is proofreading their content. They can post whatever they want about the political climate of the world. A lot of people will follow this information being fed to them blindly.
Political influencers: while some are very knowledgeable, there are many who are very biased. These influencers aren’t journalists; some simply have a large following and use their platform to share their opinions.
It wasn’t an app made for news. It was made for entertainment. These influencers know this too. The videos they make are designed to keep you engaged and clicking those like buttons.
If they only reported on authentic news without exaggerating, people wouldn’t engage with their content as much. This is why there are so many clickbait posts and pieces of media made to ragebait people to get views. Because even bad engagement is good engagement.
The social media posts that are more likely to catch people’s attention are the ones that are fake news or exaggerated. Not to mention the algorithms in these apps that are meant to keep you engaged.
You could like one video on a certain topic, and all of a sudden your feed is filled with a stream of that topic, with a lot of the posts contradicting each other. Leading people to become more confused about what’s true or false.
While some may find information on this app helpful, others end up being more confused about what is true.
With TikTok, you have constant access to all of this information. Apart from the content being posted, there are the comment sections as well.
These comment sections add even more opinions to the mix, making it harder to separate real information from someone’s personal beliefs and giving you little room to think for yourself and form your own opinions on the matters at hand.
If you’re scrolling and see a video with information, it never hurts to go to a second source to verify it. Taking an extra minute to check a reliable source elsewhere may be the difference between being informed and believing something that isn’t true.