Nieman Foundation at Harvard
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.
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.
TikTok pioneered the “For You” page — an algorithm-driven feed based on individual user behavior including likes, comments, follows, and even how long a user lingers on a video. It’s the first thing users see when they open the app and the feature has gone on to be copied by Instagram, Twitter, and Spotify. The Pew researchers looked at followed accounts because they can “give us a better understanding on the content that users actively choose to look for on the platform.”
The Pew report found TikTok content related to news, politics, and current events is “quite rare.”
“Only 10% of these followed accounts were observed posting about politics during the study period, and just 5% posted content directly related to news or current events,” according to the report.
News is even rarer among the platform’s most-followed accounts.
The followed accounts in this study that did discuss news and politics also tended to mix those topics with “humor, entertainment, and other ‘light’ content.”
Nearly half (43%) of followed accounts that discussed politics or current events also discussed entertainment and pop culture and more than a third (36%) also posted humorous content. About 17% of the followed accounts that discuss politics or current events also posted sponsored or promotional content and 14% posted dance or lip-sync performances.
“The accounts that Americans follow on TikTok are almost entirely bespoke to each individual user,” the report notes. “This is nearly no overlap in the accounts U.S. adults follow. Just 5% of these accounts are followed by five or more users in the study.”
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.”
You can read the full Pew Center report here.
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