A demographic notoriously known for being well informed. /s
I mean, at that age I started getting interested in politics and worldnews.
Well, that’s a tricky question. I was well informed in some matters, although big gaps of knowledge and experience in how to read stuff cascaded. Sometimes the source is trash and without the proper knowledge it’s hard to know, sometimes one can’t read between the lines due to lack of knowledge that there is something in-between and so on.
At the very least my point is, that kinda curated sources are generally better than random stuff on social media. It’s hard enough for young people to place information as is, it’s not getting easier by consuming news through social media where things get very deliberately shorter and flashier, because it’s mostly made for quick consumption.
That’s terrifying. Not even because the source is a Chinese company, it’s that it’s a social media company and not a trustworthy source
I view TT as a platform, not a source as a whole. There are absolutely great sources of news on TT. And honestly, I’d rather have one good quality source that can get me a daily rundown of headlines in a 3 minute or less video than spend hours watching headlines like you would on a 24 hour news channel.
yes, same. I am way north of being teenager, but after reddit crapped out, my social media usage is like 80% tiktok and the rest lemmy.
Also have lost any trust i had left in the BBC, with their targeted hate campaigns against minorities and constant right wing grift. So i rather follow few serious creators on TikTok than any professional journalist from the mainstream British press.
Do you think they’re watching news videos on TikTok? It’s just where they hear their peers talk about stuff.
And the article has a graph showing those same kids (from the UK btw) use BBC as their most common news source. It’s just they broke down “BBC” into a bunch of subcategories till a social media company was #1.
Because “12-15 year olds in the UK use the UK’s largest news organization as their source for news” wouldn’t get many clicks.
Sinclair media is equally disturbing, but very few people question the reach it has into American homes.
Not to mention the consolidation of the rest of the news landscape.
There’s several levels of trust here. I don’t trust TikTok to serve me anything critical of China, and I know they tend to downshift certain lifestyle creators. But I trust TikTok to give me better on the ground information about a current/emergent event than I do our American corporate media companies, who regularly black out certain topics with near impunity.
I worked for a TV station that got bought by Sinclair. I will say this repeatedly and with my whole chest:
Fuck Sinclair. Easily the worst employer I’ve ever had. They are the scummiest of the scummiest media companies. I can accept putting profit over everything, that’s capitalism. They seemed to go out of their way to do things in the least moral way, even if it cost them money. Fuck them. They are the modern face of evil in America.
Chairman Pooh must be pleased that his propagandists now have unfettered access to the worlds largest repository of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” knowledge.
Had a feeling.
My kids are 3 and 4. I have no idea if TikTok is still relevant when they’re 14, but if not I’m sure there will be something else equally suspicious and toxic like TikTok is now. I hope I can teach them how to look at this stuff with its self esteem crushing and political aspects.
