A fifth of 18-24-year-olds use the app for this purpose
Young people are increasingly using TikTok to access news, with some paying more attention to influencers than journalists, a report has found.
The popular, fast-growing app is used by a huge proportion of young people – 44 per cent of 18-24-year-olds – for any purpose.
The Reuters Institute’s annual study discovered that 20 per cent of this age group say they use TikTok to access news.
Last year, the figure was 40 per cent using the platform for any reason, with 15 per cent using it for news.
The data comes from a large survey of 93,895 people in 46 countries including the UK.
Facebook on the other hand is becoming less popular as a news source: used by only 28 per cent of people for this purpose compared with 42 per cent in 2016.
When it comes to obtaining news from “personalities”, 55 per cent of TikTok users say this is the case and 52 per cent of Instagram users.
This compares to just 33 per cent getting news from mainstream media and journalists on TikTok and 42 per cent on Instagram.
The number of TikTok users who said they trust “ordinary people” as news sources over other platforms was 44 per cent.
Use of Twitter for news has remained “relatively stable” in most countries.
A trend of cutting back on “depressing news” was found as social media users increasingly want to avoid stories such as the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.
Mark Brill, a senior lecturer in Future Media at Birmingham City University, said there are both advantages and drawbacks to using social media as a news source.
“The big question with social media sources, however, is that of veracity,” he told The Independent. “A lack of fact checking and or acknowledgment of authoritative sources makes it difficult to identify fake stories and information. The short-form video format does not bring an in-depth analysis, where opinions are often presented as fact.”
He added that algorithms are a big problem on TikTok because it leads to confirmation bias. This refers to people’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with their existing beliefs.
Child and behavioural expert Amanda Jenner urged parents to tell their children to look elsewhere.
“I am not a believer in directing children to learn through TikTok at all. Children can easily become addicted to social media and [it] can quickly escalate and [they could] be looking at other things they shouldn’t be watching.
“I genuinely do feel parents need to be worried. I would encourage parents to set an age where it’s acceptable to have TikTok (over the age of 13 preferably) and have a parental control app so you can monitor and control what both they are seeing and the amount of time they spend on [it]. They need to be safeguarded.”
