(Roughly) Daily

With under three weeks to go until the election, Sarah Scire with a bracing report (via a new study from Pew): even as more and more TikTok users get news from the platform, the most-followed/viewed creators don’t follow the news…

Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much.

A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional media outlets. In fact, the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows zero accounts in those categories.

For the new analysis published Tuesday, the Pew Research Center used human coding and machine classification to look at a nationally representative group of 664 U.S. adults who use TikTok and the 227,946 unique accounts they follow. (Pew researchers have shared details on how they use OpenAI’s GPT model to tackle “rote” research tasks before.) Journalists, traditional media outlets, and politicians each accounted for less than half of 1% of the followed accounts.

And this is a problem, because…

Previous studies have shown that though TikTok users — especially those under 30 — are increasingly getting news from the platform, the vast majority (95%) say they use the platform because it’s entertaining…

…

… In 2022, Pew conducted a similar analysis of the accounts U.S. adults follow on Twitter. The most recent report highlights “one key difference in following behaviors” between TikTok today and Twitter two years ago:

“The accounts followed by the largest share of U.S. adults on Twitter contained a much higher proportion of media outlets or journalists, governmental or political figures, or policy/advocacy groups than is true on TikTok today,” the Pew report notes. “These accounts are nearly nonexistent among the most-followed accounts on TikTok at the time of our new study.”…

Eminently worth reading— and pondering– in full: “The typical American TikTok user doesn’t follow a single journalist or traditional media outlet,” @pewresearch via @SarahScire and @NiemanLab.

The full report is linked above, and here.

Apposite: “Americans are as skeptical of the media as they’ve ever been– none more so than the youngest generations“

Resonant (and dark): “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is– what’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis” (gift article)

(Image above, ironically, sourced here)

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1907 that Guglielmo Marconi inititaed the first commercial trans-Atlantic radio service. Three years earlier, Marconi had introduced a service that transmitted nightly news summaries to subscribing ships.