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A Growing Number of Americans Are Getting Their News From TikTok (theverge.com) 197

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, TikTok is the second most popular source of news for Americans after X, "though most TikTok users don't primarily think of the shortform video app as a news source," notes The Verge. The survey looked at how Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X play a role in Americans' news diets. From the report: Among TikTok users, only 15 percent say keeping up with the news is a major reason they use the app. Still, 35 percent of those surveyed said they wouldn't have seen the news they get on TikTok elsewhere. And unlike other apps, the news users see on TikTok is just as likely to come from influencers or celebrities as it is from journalists -- and it's far more likely to come from total strangers. (Meanwhile, most Facebook and Instagram users say the news that pops up on their feeds is posted by friends, relatives, or other people they know; on X, users are more likely to see news posted by media outlets or reporters.)
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A Growing Number of Americans Are Getting Their News From TikTok More

A Growing Number of Americans Are Getting Their News From TikTok

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  • So stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @07:45PM (#64547865)
    The Chinese government literally controls it.

    • Re:So stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

      by sheddd ( 592499 ) <jmeadlock@perdid ... minus physicist> on Thursday June 13, 2024 @07:56PM (#64547887)

      The Chinese government literally controls it.

      Yes; those fools are allowing the communists to control their minds! Tune into Fox News with the enlightened people like me.

      • The Chinese government literally controls it.

        Yes; those fools are allowing the communists to control their minds! Tune into Fox News with the enlightened people like me.

        I was wondering who was going to show up and go through these mental gymnastics, lol.

        You do realize that this works 100 time better in reverse right?

        Random Slashdot dude: "Evil Fox News wascally wepubwicans blah blah ... "

        Other guy: "Oh, so I should get "news" from TikTok instead like you guys, right?"

      • I find it interesting that your reaction to the assertion that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese government, is controlled by China is to sneeringly imply that the accuser must be a right wing reactionary.

        Huh.

        • I find it interesting that your reaction to the assertion that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese government, is controlled by China is to sneeringly imply that the accuser must be a right wing reactionary.

          That might be coming from a Chinese shill...there appears to be a few of them out here, even on Slashdot.

    • Yeah and so what? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @08:28PM (#64547939)
      Our professional news media is controlled by a handful of mega corporations owned by an even smaller handful of billionaires.

      All of the news media you consume is controlled by extraordinarily wealthy people for the purposes of manipulating you with propaganda. Fucking Noam Chomsky told us this shit.

      It's a big club and you ain't in it.

      Go learn some critical thinking and media literacy skills and then demand that those same skills get taught in public schools. And when the religious wackadoodles get mad about it and when your kid comes home and starts saying shit about your own personal beliefs you don't like hearing take those critical thinking skills and use them so you don't stop teaching them in public schools just because you're upset.

      That's it That's the solution. Absolutely nothing else you try or do is going to work. You can't have vast swaths of ignorant people bred to believe the shit you're comfortable with and a functioning civilization. Pick one

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Eunomion ( 8640039 )
        You're not educating anyone about corporate media with a remark like that, just using it as an excuse for your own ignorance. You have no clue what media I consume (other than the sort presented here), and didn't bother to ask before presuming to already know.

        Nor is it rational to make excuses for a social media platform under the direct power of a totalitarian state when we've already seen even how destructive and Orwellian even indirect influence has been. And for what? What is the irresistible cont

      • That is not quite what Chomsky said actually.
        The Propaganda Model says that what media organizations put out has been tuned a lot by them adapting to their environment. One factor in that environment is ownership but the other 4 are important too.
        Then Chomsky points out two more things. One is that the people in the media are selected to fit in. Hence "you can say what you like because they like what you say". This may be outdated a bit but it is still very relevant.
        And a second thing he points out is the l

    • Re:So stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:39PM (#64548005)
      The summary has buried the lead here. Yes, TikTok is the second most popular source of news. But, even more than that: Twitter is apparently the most popular source of news in the United States.

      And yes, TikTok's parent company is Chinese and subject to influence by the interests of the Chinese government. While Twitter is a privately owned company and used as a plaything of its owner, Elon Musk. There may be some question about which of those parties acts in a more self-interested way, contrary to the interests of the American people, but regardless: this is a problem.

      I had no idea that Twitter was such a popular source of news. I would question how that's measured, but given the limitless ignorance of the American populace I don't have reason to doubt it.

      • Twitter is not a great source of quality news, but it's good source of stuff that just happened minutes ago. But stuff that just happened needs time to settle down, let more information show up, and a clearer picture gets time to form, the sort of stuff Twitter is bad at.

        TikTok... Well, get your news from 6 second dance moves from teens...

        • Twitter can be a great 'source' of quality news. Just follow the people who spend their time collecting the quality news, linking to it and maybe even summarizing it.

      • "And yes, TikTok's parent company is Chinese and subject to influence by the interests of the Chinese government."

        Major understatement. All media companies worldwide are subject to influence by the Chinese government, as Apple has shown by censoring political content at their behest. But as an actual Chinese company, TikTok is under the direct control of the Chinese government. And by extension, people who base their consumer or political behavior on its content are essentially under that control as wel

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        People go to Twitter and TikTok because those places have news that is rarely reported by professional outlets, and if it does make the cut it tends to be long after it trended on social media.

        Often the stories people find relevant are not the main headlines, and social media feeds them those stories so they don't have to go digging through news websites to find them. With the election in the UK that has been happening a lot lately. Often the social media posts actually link to articles by respected publica

    • Americans are stupid. Also in the news, water is wet.
      • Put it this way: A lot of powerful interests are invested in Americans being stupid, and they do a lot to make and keep it that way. If we already were, they wouldn't have to. People eventually develop immunities to gaslighting.
        • I'm afraid I have to agree with you on this one. I'm so glad I started school before 1970. I had teachers who taught .. language, mathematics, history, and we analyzed things and applied critical thinking to them. It's painful to live in the twilight of western civilization.
          • Apocalypticism is part of the gaslighting, so don't buy into it. The "twilight of western civilization" is a concept as old as the idea of western civilization itself. Critics of the excesses of every age see an inevitable moral decline, and yet I don't particularly yearn to take a DeLorean ride to someone's segregated suburbia full of wives with black eyes and broken bones, drink Al Capone's methanol-laced bathtub gin, or be drafted to drop fire on some place I'd never heard of.

            Optimism is one of the
            • Not in the slightest. If you can't see the sh*tshow going on, you're quite blind. It doesn't mean that we don't have things to be optimstic about. But you're engaging in fantasy.

  • The new talking news heads (Score:4, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @07:56PM (#64547885)
    Just as stupid as the old talking heads on cable, but now with different sponsorship!

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Not surprised but it is surprisingly sad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr_Ken ( 1163339 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @08:12PM (#64547913) Journal
    ...that American society is devolving into a population of smooth brained hominids who only seek reaction and emotion without any context or meaning involved.

    • ...that American society is devolving into a population of smooth brained hominids who only seek reaction and emotion without any context or meaning involved.

      This pretty much sums it up [imgur.com].

    • The kids are organizing politically on TikTok despite the algorithm not because of it. And in my experience the younger generations generally have better ideas than the older ones. Progress is a thing and people are learning shit. It wasn't too long ago that America was in apartheid nation in effect if not legally depending on where you're at. And we are working our way through a another round of gay panic but if the polls are to be believed this is the last one.

      The Chinese government is of course under

  • The path to happiness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:00PM (#64547971)

    Turn off the news completely and you'll find yourself in a better mood.

    Turn off all the Social Media and you might even be happy again . . . .

    • Turn off the news completely and you'll find yourself in a better mood.
      Turn off all the Social Media and you might even be happy again . . . .

      This used to be a selling point for Slashdot. You could read stories without political slant because they were tech stories, not political stories. There was a time I would have said this story doesn't belong on Slashdot because its only intent is to inflame readers.

  • I get my news from /. (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:16PM (#64547981)
    A few days late, but better than never.

  • Just a hunka hunka burnin' dumb (AAAAAAH!) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:40PM (#64548097)
    The Reverse Singularity is when some humans start getting so stupid that merely being exposed to them starts making other humans dumber. The moronicity spreads outward from the nucleus in a chain reaction, until the whole of humanity collapses in on itself in a stupornova. TikTok News is the nucleus of that durr-durr storm.

  • All *I* could think was: Sometimes it is real good to be older than the internet :-)

  • and where does Tiktok get their news from?
    People get their news from other people grabbing it from mainstream media and collecting it for you. So a big part of its function is as a news aggregator.
    It makes a huge difference what man in the middle you pick.

    "they get it from social" is chosen to disparage it, mostly because of the desire to have more control over what people take up as news.
    Because clearly some young crowds on tiktok escape narrative control and have unwanted ideas.

    • "Unwanted ideas" often means bypassing science, common sense or decency. For example, the number of Americans that believe that the Sandy Hook shootings were invented as a tool to oppress the people is almost beyond parody. All of this 'news' is circulated as fact... mainstream media has a bias depending on the flavour you pick but generally careful selection means you get facts rather than paranoid delusions. Too many people seem to see 'free thinker' as a badge of honour... the thing is that only works wh

      • We're now at a stage where mainstream media is broken in many ways - but not in all - , and your common sense has become crap. Knowing which one to pick won't help you there.
        It's also true that those who turn off the mainstream will often end up worse.
        Whenever you're mobilized against some official enemy, disinformation, China, Russia, Iran, rest assured that everything you believe is garbage.

  • 2 minute news stories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday June 14, 2024 @02:09AM (#64548289)
    TV news started it with 24 hour continuous 2 minute news stories. All competing with each other for views & clicks to sell ads. What you get is incessant, non-stop, "Hey! Shock, horror!" "Hey! Bloodbath!" "Hey! Scandal!" "Hey! Indignant outrage!" "Hey! Celebrities!" People don't have to think, only to react emotionally, & then we wonder why the electorate vote for extremist populists. Whatever happened to trying to be well-informed & make sense of what's going on in the world? Corporate news has managed to neuter democracy around the world.
  • "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on" - often attributed to Mark Twain
  • Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X for news sources.......geez !
  • A few years ago it was, "an increasing number of Americans are getting their news from The Daily Show." That guy is hugely biased, but even he would call out the left wing nut jobs when they were particularly nutty. Tiktok is cut up into bite sized pieces so small that you never need to see anything that you disagree with, unless it's a reaction video where someone is just telling you what to think about some idea. Even getting your news from CNN or Fox is a bad idea because both are so severely biased.

  • Stupid people for the most part (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Friday June 14, 2024 @07:22AM (#64548613)
    I figure this will get modded down but its time to accept that stupid people will get their news from anywhere since they lack the ability to see or deduce the most manipulative. There is no chance you can get a consistent reporting of events from a social network. Only by looking deeper into anything can you ever get close to a truth of a thing. People with lower mental abilities rarely do this. Usually they try only when its something that clashes with their hardened world views. These days you can always find some random plant with a biased view even if its about the shape of the planet.

    • I don't think that is any good and I'll prove it by adding that it does not mean you're stupid.
      There are two ways we get closer to truth:
      - by applying more time, brains, effort, background knowledge
      - by becoming better at knowing whom to trust

      A stupid person has to rely more on the second part - and if that second skill isn't very good then sorry but that is what you have to work with. But a smart person who has only so much time to spend on the issue also has to rely on trust with all its limitatoins

      It fol

  • Filtering is the Problem (Score:3)

    by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Friday June 14, 2024 @12:21PM (#64549375)

    As with all Internet and Social Media content, the problem is that what you see is largely determined by an algorithm (which tends to heavily favor the type of thing you've seen before). So, once you view a low-quality source, you are likely to be exposed to more low-quality sources. If you watch a few conspiracy theory videos, social media will ensure all you get is conspiracy theories.

    In some ways, this is an evolved problem of the cable news phenomenon. Prior to cable news (and prior to video news period), you had very limited access to news. You got your local newspaper and maybe a national news magazine. That news was vetted by a professional editor whose job it was to make sure the paper appealed to as wide a swath of the population as possible. If you had a strong political bias, you'd need to take affirmative action to join some organization like the John Birch Society and subscribe to their news letter to reaffirm it. A passive news consumer would mostly see dry headlines. When Cable News came onto the scene, they were something other than the "default" so they had to grab attention. A good way to do that was to drive outrage while reinforcing prior beliefs (most people don't like to have their beliefs challenged). As sources multiplied, they had to "shout" even louder to get noticed and keep an audience.

    For people who just want "straight news", it's become almost an impossible environment. Even the major national newspapers (such as still exist) tend to just report "both sides" instead of straight news. So it's no longer a dry statement that "X happened." Now, it's "Politican A says X is the greatest thing ever, Politician B expresses outrage at X."

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