The other day I was talking to my friend, the Editor in Chief of Ripples, and she was telling me about some news…then she said she got it from TikTok. My jaw dropped. If even the best and brightest like our esteemed Editor in Chief refuse to get their news straight from truly reputable sources, what hope is left for society?!
All jokes aside, I do think it is a problem that people consider TikTok an appropriate source for news. Especially in such a politically divisive time, it’s all too easy to be rage-baited or to fall into a rabbit hole and let strangers confirm your biases. I have heard TikTok explicitly described as a “news website,” and I take issue with that nomenclature.
It is a grave misconstrual to call TikTok a news website when it fundamentally is not. News and social media are not the same thing. “Internet personalities” generally cannot offer the same thoroughly researched facts that professional journalists can. TikTok also places entertainment value above delivering information, something news should never do. If you use social media as your sole source, your experience and understanding of news are also being muddied because you are probably consuming your news secondhand; listening to someone talking about the news rather than the news itself. I am guilty of this too — I have frequently learned about current events through video essays rather than actually looking up news. But then I experienced a problem when I would discuss these topics with others: I would often find myself simply regurgitating the essayist’s opinions rather than sharing an objective retelling of the event or even my own opinions. I was unable to speak authoritatively because I had not formed my own understanding of what I was talking about.
Many people argue that TikTok is a valid news source because there are real people on the app that are able to share perspectives that are not necessarily covered by news sites. While these people do exist, that does not mean that they are all trustworthy, or that TikTok qualifies as a news website. The app is also flooded with content that is not at all newsworthy such as AI generated historical misinformation and people trying to sell products. These are quite plainly not attributes of news websites. We are a culture that struggles with media literacy, and if people believe TikTok is a news website it is unlikely that they are using the appropriate critical thinking skills to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t. While social media can help people stay informed if they are willing to analyze what they see, in itself it is not a trustworthy source. It is inevitable that we will hear news from social media, but it is our responsibility to make sure that the information is accurate and avoid spreading it as fact when it is not. If we truly wish to understand what is happening in the world around us, we must fact-check what we hear online.
My problem isn’t necessarily with people getting information from TikTok, because that is inevitable. It’s with people blindly trusting that information, claiming that TikTok (or any other social media) qualifies as a news website simply because they gleaned information from it. There are real news websites out there that do quality reporting. While it’s worth recognizing that those organizations can’t cover every single thing and it’s important to criticize what they might omit, the solution is not to turn to TikTok. It’s one thing to absorb information through social media, and another to claim that that is enough to be truly informed about world events.
People collectively crashed out when a TikTok ban was threatened. I can’t help but wonder if people would make half as much noise as they did for TikTok if the public media services we take for granted had to close down. According to NPR, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down, leaving both NPR and PBS without federal funding. People should not be standing up for TikTok in the name of preserving a source of news, especially if they do not equally defend the people and organizations that toil away to bring us actual news when their funding is cut.