Although more people watch news on TikTok in the UK , not all of them trust its credibility 100%.
TikTok is becoming one of the fastest growing news sources among UK adults, according to a survey.
According to UK regulator Ofcom , already 7% of adults in the country use the app as news sources, a big growth from 1% in 2020.
TikTok as a news source
This news is not new considering that another survey recently came out indicating that 40% of young people use TikTok and Instagram more as a place for daily searches, above Google itself.
Of course, although growing, in the United Kingdom it is still behind websites such as the BBC, Twitter or Facebook. And for adolescents, even talking with the family or watching TV is still their main information mechanism.
“Today’s teenagers are increasingly unlikely to read a newspaper or tune in to the news on TV, preferring to stay up-to-date by scrolling through their social media,” Yih-Choung Teh, director of strategy and research at Ofcom group, said in a statement . of press. “And while young people find social media news less trustworthy, they rate these services higher for offering a variety of opinions on current stories.”
But are the fonts any good?
TikTok may be the most viral, but it’s not necessarily the most reliable.
Only during the conflict between Ukraine and Russia did it become a channel for disinformation, according to research that analyzed videos posted on the platform.
Specifically, since June 2020, this platform began to surpass YouTube in terms of average minutes per day used by users between the ages of 4 and 18. This demographic reached 82 minutes per day connected on TikTok , compared to 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
These figures were exceeded in 2021, since at the end of this year children and adolescents consumed the platform managed by ByteDance an average of 91 minutes per day, compared to the 56 minutes per day they spent watching YouTube.