On Thursday, the White House issued an executive order that clears the way for an acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. assets. A group of corporate billionaires and venture firms, including Oracle and Silver Lake Management, will take control of a U.S. version of TikTok (tentatively titled M2) in a deal that values the upcoming app at $14 billion.
The deal isn’t official yet, and its exact terms are still cloudy, but the proposed framework has raised some questions: Is Trump getting a bargain with that $14 billion valuation? What role will Oracle play? And what will the rest of the world do?
A fresh report from the Pew Research Center has triggered yet another set of queries: What does this deal mean for the growing percentage of Americans who get their news from TikTok? Will they continue to rely on an app with close ties to the Trump administration, or will they look elsewhere for their daily updates?
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After surveying a diverse range of U.S. adults, Pew found that 20% of respondents regularly get their news from TikTok. That percentage was sitting at 3% in 2020 and has grown steadily with each passing year.
TikTok’s status as a Gen Z news source is well-established. Reuters reported in 2023 that 20% of 18-to-24-year-olds use the app for that purpose.
The increasing adoption of TikTok-based news has been driven by older cohorts in addition to Gen Z. In the 30-to-49 age bracket, the percentage of people tracking current events on TikTok is up 6% year-over-year to 25%. And 2025 is the first year in which the percentage of 50-to-64-year-olds who get news from TikTok is in the double digits (it’s at 10% right now and growing with each passing year).
Add it all up, and TikTok is now the second-most common social media news source; it delivers headlines to 55% of U.S. adults, putting it just two percentage points behind X. On that axis, TikTok has surpassed Facebook and Reddit after trailing them as recently as 2023.
When that trend collides with the Trump administration’s dubious commitment to the truth, the results could be world-shaping. Will consumers still turn to TikTok when it has a recommendation algorithm backed by U.S. conservatives, or will the app become a nakedly partisan news source a la X or Truth Social (both of which showed year-over-year usage declines in the Pew report)?
By trying to shield Americans from the national security threats and pro-Chinese political bias they perceived on TikTok, Trump and his allies may have opened the door for a whole new wave of unreliable social media reporting. At the same time, very few Americans follow journalists on TikTok — so it’s possible that many people who turn to TikTok for news may not even notice the app’s shifting focus.
