Social media influencers and celebrities are now the dominant source of news among users of apps like Snapchat and TikTok that are popular among young Americans, overtaking mainstream news sources in the process, per a new report by the UK-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
“While mainstream journalists often lead conversations around news in Twitter and Facebook, they struggle to get attention in newer networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, where personalities, influencers, and ordinary people are often more prominent, even when it comes to conversations around news,” according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2023 (pdf) released on June 13. According to SEO platform Backlinko, Snapchat reaches more than 75 percent of the GenZ and millennial population in the United States. Meanwhile, 37.3 percent of GenZ Americans use TikTok at least once a month.
On TikTok, 55 percent of users got their news from personalities including influencers and celebs compared to just 33 percent from mainstream news. On Snapchat, this was at 55 percent to 36 percent. On Instagram, the proportion was 52 percent to 42 percent.
On Twitter, 55 percent of users got their news from mainstream channels, followed by 43 percent from personalities. On Facebook, these figures stood at 43 percent and 38 percent. The report is based on a global survey conducted in January–February 2023 among more than 92,000 individuals from 46 nations.
Social media influencers becoming a significant source of news and news analysis has been a trend that many experts have observed in recent years.
During the defamation trial involving Hollywood celebrities Johnny Depp and ex-wife Amber Heard, several influencers from Instagram and YouTube raked in millions of views covering the court case. “The mainstream media lost the Depp-Heard trial and the lifestyle influencers turned court correspondents won,” said the headline of a June 2022 article from NYMag.
The collapse of crypto exchange FTX last year also put social media influencers in the spotlight. “Influencers outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion,” said the headline of a Jan. 5 article at The Washington Post.
Some see this shift in news consumption as being the result of a growing lack of trust in mainstream media sources.
“Twitter has broken just about every piece of this FTX story using blockchain analytics, while NYT is writing puff pieces on a criminal. Feels like a turning point for citizen journalism and loss of trust in MSM,” Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, said in a Nov. 6 tweet.
New Generation and Trust in Social Media News
A Pew Research survey published in October last year showed that the younger generation of Americans are now likely to trust social media news as much as national news outlets.
Among Americans aged 50-64, 62 percent said they had “some or a lot of trust” in the information they get from national news organizations. Only 25 percent said the same about social media sites. When it came to Americans aged 18-29, these numbers were at 56 percent and 50 percent.
Talking about the shifting preference of new generation news consumers, Prof. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute, pointed out that “those born in the 1980s did not suddenly come to prefer landline phones over mobiles when they became parents or bought a house, nor did those born in the 1960s return to black-and-white television when they entered middle age.”
Similarly, “there are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older.”
Security Threat
The growth of social media apps as a trustworthy source of news among the younger generation of Americans can pose a challenge to the security of the United States, as some of the apps have ties with China.
For instance, TikTok is a Chinese-owned app. In a speech in December, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that “[TikTok’s] parent company [Bytedance] is controlled by the Chinese government and it gives them the potential to leverage the app in ways that I think should concern us.”
He pointed out that the app gives CCP the power to control the recommendation algorithm which allows them to “manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.”
“They also have the ability on it to get access [via] the software through devices … So you have millions of devices and that gives them the ability to engage in different kinds of malicious cyber activity through that,” he said.
In an EpochTV interview last year, Casey Fleming, a cyber-security expert and CEO of strategic advisory firm BlackOps Partners, also warned that foreign-controlled mobile apps pose a security threat to America.
“We must assume that every one of these applications coming from China, Russia, and other declared adversaries of the United States—we have to assume that these applications are weaponized against us,” he said.
