TikTok: A Rising Social Phenomenon or News Desert?
TikTok's explosive growth raises concerns as study reveals dearth of news content, challenging journalism's presence on the platform
The social network TikTok was launched in 2016. Since then, it has gathered a community of more than 843,3 million users worldwide. According to some 2021 projections, it was destined to pass the 900 million threshold in 2024 and reach more than 950 million users in 2025. The adoption skyrocketed very early, and worldwide users went over 1 billion in just five years, from 2016 to 2021. Facebook and Instagram, two other popular social networks, had to wait ten years before getting the same results. TikTok has perfected its growth strategy and adapted its application accordingly.
One of the most interesting features of the TikTok community is its young age. The Chinese social network is among the most popular among those under 30, and yet, as a recent post on the Nieman Lab blog states, "TikTok is hostile terrain for news." The post by Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis reports on a recent study conducted by Nick Hagar and Nicholas Diakopoulos of Northwestern University that looked at whether news is present on the platform.
The findings
The findings of the study are significant. The researchers, using various bots, analyzed a substantial set of over 6500 videos on TikTok. Shockingly, only 6 could be classified as news. This led Hagar and Diakopoulos to speculate that the For Your Page algorithm, which suggests videos to users, is designed to steer clear of news. This is the case, despite some of the bots being programmed to mimic news-hungry user behavior.
The analysis of trending hashtags draws similar results. Of the more than 700 considered, only one (#breakingnews) was news-related. Moreover, it passed a lot of non-journalistic information and a great number of misinformative content.
Of course, the results must be taken cum grano salis, as the analyzed set was limited in size and language (Hagar and Dimakopoulos' findings are confined to English). Yet, it is an exciting attempt to understand the relationship between TikTok and journalism. Currently, there are no other ways since TikTok won't allow any researcher access to their Find Your Page algorithm structure and code.
TikTok and science journalism
This kind of research should also be taken into consideration in science journalism. In fact, if the journalistic content on TikTok is limited, so must the science journalism content. But, as the Nieman Lab post underlines, the huge quantity of contents users consume on TikTok are related to pop culture and entertainment. So there is where science communicators must aim for their content to become visible on TikTok.
These results are a gentle reminder of one of the basic assumptions in (science) communication: there is not just one single communication strategy that works well on different communication channels. In fact, each platform has its own rules and habits, and the communication strategy should adapt consequently, not the other way around.
