This is Viewpoints Explained…
Where do you get your daily dose of news? Go back ten or twenty years and this answer was likely, ‘from a newspaper’, ‘a desktop website’ or ‘the local news’. Today, these habits look a lot different.
A new poll out last month by pew research shows that TikTok continues to gain ground as a space for news. While other social media sites have sat relatively stagnant or have seen a downturn, news consumption on the video app has nearly doubled since 2020. As of October, about a third of teens and adults ages eighteen to twenty-nine regularly get their news on TikTok. For middle-aged users between thirty and forty-nine years old, this number slices in half and sits at about fifteen percent.
So, what makes TikTok so special? Well, it’s convenient and the quick, swipeable videos with broken down explanations are easy to digest. And unlike traditional media, this news often comes from an independent content creator rather than a journalist backed by a larger company. This is significant because trust in the media has been falling post-pandemic. A report published earlier this year by the reuters institute for the study of journalism showed that on average only about 32 percent of Americans say they trust most news most of the time. With the presidential election just around the corner, only time will tell if TikTok continues to dominate in the space.
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