7
votes
A growing share of TikTok's adult users say they regularly get news on the site, bucking the trend on other social media platforms
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- Title
- More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites
- Published
- Oct 21 2022
- Word count
- 476 words
This is saddening.
Why?
Tons of "real" news organizations, from local to national to global, have TikTok accounts and post decent and engaging summaries of their existing journalism many times a day. They make revenue from this, and people get short but no less accurate information than they would on television.
It's true that mixing entertainment with news is a problem, and so is distributing news over proprietary platforms, but that's been an issue as far back as we've had televised news.
Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
I don't use TikTok anymore, but when I did, I rarely got news on my feed from "real" or respectable organizations - and I'd like to think that I'm the type of person who the algorithm would show that to. What I did see, despite trying to scroll past it when it did pop up, was highly opinionated videos by small creators or individuals talking about their perspective on current events. Very rarely did I actually see "news-style" factual reporting - it was always heavily opinionated. Probably because that's what gets views and engagement, I guess.
That's so interesting. I'm a regular TikTok user and I get basically four kinds of content:
A while ago I mentioned twitter being a terrible news aggregate and if someone gets their news from twitter they’re getting it from influencers or wanna-be thought leaders.
It can be a lucrative grift, on either side of the political spectrum.