New research — On TikTok, news is hard to find

Read it first on my Substack

TikTok isn’t built with news as its top priority. It’s an entertainment platform, with a focus on organic viral trends and a strong affinity with pop music. News outlets can’t link back to a story from a TikTok. The For You Page is heavily shaped by personalization algorithms, so breaking through to new audiences can be a challenge.

Yet many news publishers are active on TikTok. The potential audience is massive, and it skews younger than many other digital channels. In our new study, published in New Media and Society, we wanted to understand how these efforts paid off. From a user’s perspective, does news reliably show up on the For You Page? Is it timely and high quality, or recycled aggregation from elsewhere on the internet? For news publishers, does the popularity of the platform translate into high viewership? Is there an appetite for reported journalism, or do outlets need to stick to lighter fare?

To answer these questions, we focused on four aspects of news on TikTok. The first three concern how a user might encounter journalism on the platform: account recommendations, For You Page videos, and trending hashtags. The last, viewership on videos from news outlets, examines the experience publishers might face when adapting their content to TikTok. In all cases, our results point toward a platform that largely favors entertainment over news, and that requires new strategies from outlets to succeed.

Recommendations don’t include news outlets

When you follow someone on TikTok, or visit their profile on the web, the platform shows you a sidebar of related accounts. This sidebar is a potential avenue for discovering new accounts, which might help introduce users to journalists and news outlets.

This feature generally works well — if you look at any account related to the NFL, for example, you’ll likely get lots of football recommendations. But this isn’t the case for news. When we examined the accounts recommended alongside news outlets — starting with the Washington Post, NBC News, NPR, and PBS News — we found that only 6% of accounts recommended were related to news.

It’s unclear why relevant recommendations are so scarce for news outlets. Perhaps there just aren’t enough newsy accounts on the platform to fill up the sidebar, or TikTok prefers to surface other kinds of news-adjacent accounts (e.g., government officials, nonprofits). But for news producers using the platform, this deficiency represents a lost opportunity to connect with new audiences.

A news-free experience for new users

The new user experience is, of course, crucial for any platform. The algorithm doesn’t yet have any data to shape the user’s recommendations, but it must capture their attention to keep them coming back. In this situation, many platforms rely on content that is generally viral, reasoning that posts with a proven track record are most likely to resonate with new users.

TikTok seems to follow this strategy. We simulated the new user experience on the platform, by creating 60 new accounts and setting up a bot to swipe through the For You Page of each. In every case, the bots saw a mix of generic viral content — comedy sketches, makeup tutorials, cooking videos. Even after trying to push the algorithm toward showing journalism, by having the bots follow news outlets and dwell on news videos, there wasn’t a meaningful increase in the amount of news that that users saw.

Again, this presents a cause for concern around news discoverability on TikTok. The algorithm doesn’t seem to proactively place news content in front of users; they must seek it out. For users who aren’t already active news consumers, or who don’t have a sense of where they might find reliable news coverage on TikTok, there aren’t many opportunities to connect with news publishers.

Trending entertainment and pop culture news

As might be expected from TikTok’s heavy focus on entertainment, much of the news that does trend on the platform skews toward pop culture. Looking at the top news and entertainment hashtags over the course of a week, we found that television, movies, and music dominated. None of what might be considered “hard news” — the kind of stories that a major newspaper would place on their front page — trended.

Looking forward

Given these factors, it’s unsurprising that many news publishers struggle to find a broad audience on TikTok. For 120 news producers that we were able to find on TikTok, the median video had just 4,700 views. The median account had 256,000 followers — large, but nowhere near the size of many of the platform’s influencers.

Of course, the goal of TikTok isn’t to make news popular. Journalism always represents just a small fraction of what people consume on social media. But this platform does represent a shift in the landscape of how publishers find audiences, and there are a few ways the situation could develop.

First, publishers could find ways to adapt. Their TikTok output could lean softer, highlighting fun stories that work with the TikTok audience. The Washington Post has found some success with this approach, and other outlets might follow suit.

Second, the platform could intervene. TikTok could decide that a strong news presence is a civic good and tweak the algorithm accordingly. Like some other platforms, they could even go as far as to pay news outlets directly, or to more directly push high-quality reporting into users’ feeds.

Finally, the idea of an authoritative news producer might fade. TikTok users might gravitate toward getting their news from charismatic influencers, who recycle coverage from outlets and present it secondhand. In this environment, verifying information and identifying trustworthy sources will become more difficult, and that burden will fall largely on the news consumer.

For researchers, too, TikTok’s dominance demands a shift in working practices. We discuss the challenges presented by studying this platform in detail in the paper. In short — analyzing video is difficult, TikTok is substantially more locked down than many social media platforms, and its heavy reliance on individual experience shaped by personalization algorithms makes it difficult to understand how popularity works. This study represents a first attempt to quantify some aspects of how news spreads on TikTok. To develop a deeper understanding, we require new tools for data collection and analysis, and more visibility into the platform’s data.