TikTok sees significant growth in daily news consumption on its platform

New Delhi, Sep 21

Chinese short-form video app TikTok is now becoming a key news source for its users and in the US, 33 per cent of its users now regularly get their news on the short-video app, up from 22 per cent in 2020.

This TikTok rise in the daily news source business comes as other big social media platforms see decline in regular news consumption on their platforms.

Facebook now has only 44 per cent of its users getting regular news updates, down from 54 per cent from two years ago, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

However, when it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook still outpaces all other social media sites on overall metrics.

Roughly a third of US adults (31 per cent) say they regularly get news from Facebook.

A quarter of US adults regularly get news from YouTube, while smaller shares get news from Twitter (14 per cent), Instagram (13 per cent), TikTok (10 per cent) or Reddit (8 per cent).

Fewer Americans regularly get news from LinkedIn (4 per cent), Snapchat (4 per cent), WhatsApp (3 per cent) or Twitch (1 per cent).

In many cases, there are demographic differences between the people who turn to each social media site regularly for news, said the study that came out late on Tuesday.

"On several of the social media sites we asked about, adults under 30 make up the largest share of those who regularly get news on the site," said the Pew study.

For example, half or more of regular news consumers on Snapchat (67 per cent), TikTok (52 per cent) and Reddit (50 per cent) are ages 18 to 29.

Additionally, women make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Facebook, while the opposite is true for sites like Twitter and Reddit.