New Survey: More Americans use TikTok to watch the news

By Naija Tech News October 24, 2022 Uncategorized 0 Comments

Naija Tech News on October 25th, a new survey by the Pew Research Center in the United States shows that more and more Americans are getting news through TikTok.

The survey shows that the percentage of Americans getting news from TikTok has tripled since 2020. Currently, about 10 percent of U.S. adults regularly get news through the app. Among adults under 30, that jumped to 26 percent.

TikTok users are also changing the way they use the app, one of which is increasingly using it as a news source . A third of adult users on the app say they get news from the platform, up from 22% in 2020. TikTok is increasingly acting like a news app, in contrast to what the Pew Research Center has found on other platforms, where news consumption is stagnant or declining.

In the case of Facebook, in 2020, 54% of adults said they get news from the platform. Now, that number has dropped to 44 percent. Meanwhile, YouTube has remained flat over the past few years, with about a third of users getting news on the platform.

26% of adults under 30 use TikTok for news

For young people, it’s not surprising that TikTok may replace or complement other sources as a place to find news. It was also reported last month that Gen Z (born between 1995 and 2009) now use TikTok as a search engine.

TikTok stopped being a kids dance app a long time ago. Last year, users noticed that TikTok was recording major news events, and viewers were mesmerized by its breathless video updates. In February of this year, the Russian-Ukrainian war influencer entered the audience’s attention through an algorithm, recorded the state of the conflict, and millions of people watched it through short videos. As movie star Johnny Depp goes to trial in defamation case against ex-wife Amber Heard, Depp supporters post live court updates on TikTok, including analysis and conspiracy theories . As creators make a splash on social media with Depp-supporting content, their audience numbers are growing rapidly.

Meanwhile, as more people get their news through TikTok, the platform has struggled to curb disinformation related to topics such as the Russian-Ukrainian war, abortion, elections and the coronavirus pandemic. A recent study by NewsGuard, a disinformation monitoring site, found that nearly 20 percent of the videos provided by TikTok searches contained false information.

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