TikTok is a news source for U.S. adults, but they’re not following traditional media outlets

TikTok has emerged as a popular news source, but new data from the Pew Research Center raises some questions about where that news is coming from. The venerable pollster published a survey of the TikTok accounts followed by U.S. adults, and entities like journalists, traditional media outlets, industry experts, nonprofits, and political officials only claimed a miniscule percentage of those follows.

To conduct its survey, Pew looked at more than 227,000 TikTok accounts to ask a simple question: Who do Americans follow? The most common answers to that question shouldn’t surprise anyone. “Mid-tier” individual creators account for 46% of follows. Topics that appear frequently among the measured accounts include pop culture (59% of follows), viral dances (37%), comedy (36%), and personal vlogs (36%).

The interesting part of the report concerns the types of accounts that Americans are not following. Journalists, pundits, and media outlets accounted for just .4% of the measured follows. The percentages were even smaller for industry experts (.3%), nonprofits (.2%) and government sources like politicians, officials, and agencies (.1%).

There are a few potential explanations for those paltry figures. Traditional media outlets are not as active on TikTok as the new wave of creator-journalists, and some of those tastemakers — such as progressive firebrand Hasan Piker — could be classified as pundits themselves.

Pew has its own theories. The firm noted that recent statistics have shown a surge in social media’s popularity as a news outlet (especially TikTok), but even with that surge, news isn’t the main reason why Americans use social platforms.

“A Center survey of adult internet users conducted earlier this year found that nearly half of TikTok users report that they see political content on the site, but that’s not the primary reason most users say they are there,” reads the report. “And 95% of U.S. adult TikTok users say they use it because it’s entertaining, while 41% say they use it to get news and 36% use it to keep up with politics.”

But if politics is playing second fiddle to entertainment on TikTok, no one told the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns. During the so-called “influencer election,” both of the major political parties in the United States have courted creators. Trump has become a staunch TikTok ally (somehow), while the Democrats gave creators front-row seats at the 2024 convention, much to the chagrin of some traditional media journalists. The sitting president also got in on the trend by inviting influencers to the inaugural White House Creator Economy Conference.

Those efforts will give the presidential campaigns crucial reach among TikTok’s Gen Z community, but the latest Pew findings make us wonder how Americans are selecting the political accounts they follow. Are those choices based on entertainment value or journalistic integrity? And if the former factor is more valuable to Americans, what does that say about the way we consume news?

There’s room for much more exploration related to those questions. Perhaps the news creators on TikTok will delve deeper now that they have America’s collective attention.