An official depressing study revealed that TikTok is the fastest-growing source of news for British adults. For teenagers, the top news source was Instagram, closely followed by TikTok then YouTube.
The situation is even worse in the US, where a quarter of adults say they use TikTok to get their news.
The Guardian reported on the study by Ofcom, the official watchdog for TV, Internet, and other communications services.
The TikTokers are coming. The social video platform is the fastest growing news source for UK adults, according to a survey, but nearly half of people using it for current affairs turn to fellow TikTokers rather than conventional news organisations for their updates.
TikTok is used by 7% of adults for news, according to the UK’s communications watchdog, up from 1% in 2020. The growth is primarily driven by young users, with half of its news followers aged 16 to 24.
While the 7% figure puts it well below mainstream TV channels, like the BBC, Sky, and ITV, it’s the rate of growth which paints a worrying picture.
The concern is that social media platforms are extremely susceptible to both misinformation and disinformation. This has been particularly evident in coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Disinformation is the deliberate distribution of false information that intends to cause harm, whereas misinformation is when false information is shared but no harm is meant […]
One video captioned “Ukrainian soldiers saying goodbye to their families” has had 2.8m views but is clearly footage of US soldiers and their loved ones. Video game footage has also been adapted, with one clip purportedly showing a Ukrainian jet downing a Russian fighter – which has had nearly 10m views and is still live – but can be traced to a YouTube video made on a flight simulator game.
Worse, people continue to use TikTok as a news source despite knowing it to be unreliable.
“Teenagers today are increasingly unlikely to pick up a newspaper or tune into TV News, instead preferring to keep up-to-date by scrolling through their social feeds,” said Yih-Choung Teh, Ofcom’s group director for strategy and research. “And while youngsters find news on social media to be less reliable, they rate these services more highly for serving up a range of opinions on the day’s topical stories.”
The Ofcom study showed that news organisations are having to compete with non-journalist TikTokers as a news source on the platform. For those who consume news on TikTok, their main source is other people they follow (44%), followed by friends and family (32%) and then news organisations (24%). The most popular official news sources on TikTok include Sky News, the BBC and ITV.
Other social media networks are also popular news sources, with both Instagram and Facebook out-performing official news sites and TV channels among 16-24 year olds.
An earlier depressing study showed that the position is even worse in the US.
A quarter of US adults say they always use TikTok to get the news, with nearly half of US millennial and Gen Z adults – under-41s and under-25s respectively – indicating the same, according to the analysis firm Forrester Research.
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