Young People Get Their News from TikTok. That's a Huge Problem for Democrats. [View all]

[babylonsister]

Seems like a dangerous conflict we could probably do without. I don't use TikTok so I'm pretty neutral about this, though did not know you could find news there. But who's writing the news? Any unbiased sources informing the masses?

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/democrats_tiktok_news_ban_biden.php

Columbia Journalism Review
The Media Today
Young People Get Their News from TikTok. That’s a Huge Problem for Democrats.
March 15, 2024 By Cameron Joseph


Democrats are doing the most awkward TikTok dance.

The House’s Wednesday vote to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social media behemoth to an American entity has put Democrats from President Biden on down in a tough spot. Most are now on record backing a bill that could shutter a fast-growing platform that’s most popular with the young voters they so badly need.

TikTok users aren’t just kids mindlessly scrolling dance videos. Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18–29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022—a number that’s almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18–29 use the app.

“It is astonishing the extent to which TikTok has become the primary information platform for young people,” said Jesse Lehrich, a Democratic strategist and Big Tech critic. “Us olds are slow to pick up on the ways that young people are actually using these platforms. People use it as search. People use it as their primary news source.”

Pissing off TikTok users is obviously a risk for Democrats. As Biden administration Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News a few weeks ago, if Democrats ban TikTok, “the politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.” (One irate TikTok user recently left a congressman a voicemail saying that “TikTok is my Google” and that, if they didn’t vote against banning it, “you’re gonna see me at your house.”)