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Young People Turn to TikTok for News. What Do They Get?

As the app becomes gen Z’s de facto search engine, questions emerge about ‘filter bubbles,’ fact checking and reliability.

Sarah Krichel 27 Aug 2024The Tyee

Sarah Krichel is The Tyee’s social media manager.

Initially popular for its entertaining dance videos, TikTok — the world’s most downloaded social media app from 2020 to 2022 — is now a place young people are getting their regular doses of news, too.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2024 Digital News Report, news consumption on social media platforms is up, and video in general is becoming an increasingly crucial news source — particularly for young people. With news consumption down on both X and Facebook, TikTok has become one of the leading social media sources of news alongside YouTube and WhatsApp.

In Canada, the rise could be due in part to Meta’s blocking of news content on Facebook and Instagram last year. A recent report from the Media Ecosystem Observatory found that one-third of local news outlets active on social media before the ban are now inactive. The observatory’s report also found that engagement with Canadian news on TikTok has increased 24 per cent since Mark Zuckerberg banned news on his platforms.

“TikTok is something a lot of people use as a reliable source of information,” said Melody Devries, a digital media professor in communications at Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College who earned her PhD at Toronto Metropolitan University. Devries specializes in how our interactions with digital media and algorithms inadvertently build our world view over time.

“This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think it has a lot of potential as a different kind of media source. You see a lot of interesting information and takes. It can be a great way to spread political information or knowledge.

“There's something for everybody on TikTok. I'm low-key obsessed with it because of that.”

At the same time, Devries notes that online platforms face significant barriers to ensuring their users provide reliable information.

Meta and TikTok both partner with third-party fact-checking organizations that flag content as false or misleading. The platforms then decide whether to restrict that content from its algorithms, label it as misinformation or take it down altogether.

For those who have already been repeatedly exposed to conspiratorial or misleading content, Devries says, that fact checking “isn’t really an effective way of breaking people out of [their] world views.”

So what’s the solution? Is there a way to make TikTok, the de facto search engine for gen Z, a reliable space to get news and information?

TikTok’s efforts to be news-friendly — and its shortcomings

Last month, TikTok Canada invited journalists to presentations and panel discussions about TikTok’s youth safety protocols in Vancouver and Toronto. The Tyee attended the sessions.

According to Tara Wadhwa, global head of regional product policy at TikTok, the business case for being a platform that is safe “by design” is that users create the best content in these kinds of environments.

TikTok uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human-based moderation to screen words, images, titles, descriptions and audio. TikTok employs 40,000 people who speak 75 different languages worldwide on safety teams, which work 24-7 to moderate the content uploaded by its over one billion global users to determine its suitability for TikTok audiences.

The app removes content that violates its community guidelines. If a piece of content is removed, users are made aware via an in-app notification. They are then provided with the option to appeal the removal.

The company also adds “verified” labels to official news outlets to signal that their content is trustworthy and recommends resource pages to users in-app during election cycles. It appends content warnings to videos that may be too distressing for a broad audience.

“If someone is talking about the election and thinking of going to vote, there'll be a banner on the bottom and it’ll drive you to our in-app elections guide,” said Wadhwa. “That’ll give you your local registration information, information about where you can vote, about voting day and polling results.”

TikTok works with news outlets like the Associated Press and live fact-checking organizations to ensure election-related information is up to date, Wadhwa added.

But Devries says these measures can do only so much.

“You’re exposed to things you might not have otherwise been exposed to via certain algorithmic trends,” she said.

Devries says she repeatedly encounters the same misleading information or conspiracies. For example, the viral TikTok claim that sunscreen is bad for you and causes cancer.

“You can start to have doubts in the effectiveness of sunscreen,” said Devries. “Then you might encounter other anti-science content. Over time you build up this comfort level with questioning taken-for-granted knowledge in society.”

“I don’t know that people who believe sunscreen is a lie would take [TikTok’s] fact checking seriously,” Devries said.

Fact-checking mechanisms can in fact have the opposite effect, strengthening a user’s bias instead of educating them, said Devries. In her experience, “false” labels and debunking links can make users defensive, raising questions about censorship and how their content is being moderated.

The better solution, she says, is stopping the harmful content in the first place. However, it’s a double-edged sword.

“That opens discussion of censoring and blocking certain content,” Devries said. “A lot of social media platforms don't want to go down that route, because it can get very messy very quickly.”

Wadhwa said TikTok takes the issue of “filter bubbles” — “getting into one set of content types that you can’t break out of” — seriously, through strategies that include interrupting repetitive content patterns so you can expand the content types you see.

While a filter bubble can be harmless for cute cat videos, it quickly becomes worrying, or even dangerous, when it leads users down misinformation and radicalizing rabbit holes.

It’s a difficult problem to solve, Devries says, because algorithm curation is about giving you more of the same.

Social media models “are driven by the need to generate more interaction and more content,” she adds. Cutting down interactions is in conflict with how the algorithms are built.

When TikTok deems newsworthy topics ‘sensitive’

Over the years, creators have alleged TikTok’s algorithm suppresses content from certain communities.

In 2019, for example, the app suppressed content by queer, fat or disabled people after deeming their content was “vulnerable to cyberbullying.”

In 2021, TikTok was caught flagging content that supported Black Lives Matter or Black people as “inappropriate.” The app claimed this was an error and said it worked to rectify the problem.

TikTok also has a history of bringing forward other trending topics like “tradwife” content — videos that romanticize “traditional” feminine gender roles — and “crunchy” content — a new take on the older term “granola,” referring to supposedly organic lifestyle choices, which has links to anti-vaccine ideologies and has been increasingly co-opted by the alt-right.

More recently, there have been complaints against TikTok — as well as X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — for “shadow banning” pro-Palestine content.

A TikTok spokesperson told Al Jazeera, which reported on the situation last year, that the company “does not moderate or remove content based on political sensitivities.”

TikTok is somewhat famously also the site that gave birth to what some call “algospeak” — coded language used to dodge AI moderation — including terms like “unalive” and “grape,” referring to killing or suicide and rape.

A TikTok spokesperson told The Tyee it removes content that violates its guidelines and that it regularly updates its safeguards as users’ language evolves to evade the filters.

While TikTok doesn’t allow hate speech, it wants to allow users to express speech countering hate, said Wadhwa, and doesn’t want users to need to create workarounds to do it. The company therefore considers a “nuance” around those cases, said Wadhwa.

Using coded language is “almost a game” for those in alt-right and conspiratorial circles, said Devries. “You have content that is explicitly and intentionally coded to convey certain ideas subtly. Then you get people that start using that content and don’t necessarily notice the underlying dog whistle but continue to produce that content.”

“What apps should be watching out for is related to how we define conspiracy, how we define far-right or white supremacist politics,” said Devries.

“Are we able to design algorithms that can seek out content that have the potential to produce more problematic politics? I don’t know if that's possible.”

Can we intertwine our news with our entertainment?

Social media has become the go-to “passive mode of information consumption,” said Devries. “We're dominated by the amount of power that social media companies have.”

As a result, journalists and industries are pivoting to meet the demand of providing fact checks and bite-sized information, creating “a different kind of media sphere that appeals to a different group of people.”

“I don’t think that it has to be a negative thing,” Devries added. “There's a lot of potential for those journalism jobs to create creative content to go outside of the lines of what we think of as journalistic content that might appeal to younger generations.”

There’s also potential for short-form video “to create different networks of knowledge,” Devries says. TikTok users can learn a lot about home inspections on the platform, for example, or different histories or cultures trending in awareness, like Appalachian folklore.

“It shows how short-form video has the capacity to create different networks of knowledge. That wouldn’t be the case with a piece of media that is strictly news,” said Devries.

“It can never fully be entertainment. It can never fully be news.”

Ultimately, it’s about habit forming, said Devries. “Habits are how we build our reality, how we build our understanding of ourselves. Perhaps even our political identity is formed by certain habits, like donating to parties or putting up lawn signs or sharing stuff on Facebook.

“Habits work inward as much as they work outward.”  [Tyee]

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