Earlier this summer, one Google executive stated that TikTok was beginning to eat into its core business, particularly among younger users. But this isn’t all that TikTok is now seemingly used for – a recent Pew Research Center study reports that of the examined Americans’ use of Social Media, 33% of TikTok users now say that they regularly get news from TikTok, up from 22% back in 2020.
TikTok Just In
On the other end of the spectrum, other social platforms seem to be declining in the same metric – including, in particular, Facebook, where now only 44% of its users report regularly getting their news from the app, down from 54% in the last two years. Pew Research’s data suggests that TikTok has grown from being just an entertainment platform for quirky dances and lip sync videos to one that many of its users turn to learn about what’s happening in the world.
Such a new use case may raise concerns given TikTok’s connection to China, which it has recently been pressed to clarify in a Senate hearing. The hearing followed the release of a BuzzFeed news report that discovered how China-based ByteDance employees had been regularly accessing TukTo US users’ private data. If TikTok were to become one of the primary ways younger users in the US learn about news and current events, that could propel the app into being a channel for other foreign powers to influence users’ beliefs with just a slight tweak to its algorithm.
For now, however, TikTok, despite a slight uptick, still lags behind Facebook overall when it comes to news consumption. Pew found that 31% of US adults regularly get their news from Facebook, higher than the 25% who do the same on YouTube, and from the 14% and 13% who get it from Twitter and Instagram respectively. TikTok ranked 5th here with only 10% of US adults saying that they regularly get news from the app.
To add, Pew somewhat backed up Google’s assertion that it was losing ground to TikTok, and even other platforms, as it noted that the percentage of US adults who often got their news via web search has dropped from 23% in 2020 to 18% currently. However, this didn’t really point to TikTok as ‘gaining’, as the percentage of adults often using Social Media for any sort of news consumption dropped from 23% to 17% in the last two years, as did other forms of news consumption like news websites and apps.
The Wrap
It’s not clear that any single platform is benefiting from these declines, as Pew didn’t uncover a shift from digital news sources to others, such as TV, print, and radio – all of these saw declines in news consumption too. Despite this, digital devices continue to jump the fence compared to TV as the latter has been experiencing a usage drop as a source of news from 40% in 2020 to 31% at present. Surprisingly, Pews found out that more Americans (53%) said that they would rather get their news digitally than from TV (33%), which has stayed consistent since 2020.
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