Younger generations rely on social-media apps like TikTok for their daily news content.
Key Details
- A new study from the Reuters Institute‘s Digital News Report says that 20% of respondents between the age of 18 and 24 use TikTok for news.
- This marks a 5% increase from the previous year.
- 150 million Americans, or greater than 45%, have downloaded the TikTok app.
- Less than half of the survey’s 94,000 respondents are interested in news, declining 15% in the past five years.
- 30% of respondents say they prefer using social media networks to deliver news to them rather than visiting news websites.
- Only 32% of respondents say that they trust the news media, while 56% worry that they cannot identify fake news.
Why It’s Important
Social media is changing how young people interact with each other and society at least. This is nothing new. Television and the internet were disruptive to traditional media, entertainment, and journalism long before Apple revealed the concept of the App Store.
For younger generations, part of that change means they are less interested in directly interacting with traditional media sources. The 2023 Digital News Report found that this same age bracket was the least likely of any sampled to follow daily news, preferring to pay more attention to celebrity influencers and larger online personalities, Tubefiller reports.
“There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older,” says Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Nielsen.