Teens shun traditional news channels for TikTok and Instagram, Ofcom says

19 comments
  1. I’d be very much surprised if teens weren’t shunning traditional news channels long before TikTok and even Instagram existed.

  2. Maybe if the news were actually engaging, didn’t continually treat anyone between the age of 18 and 35 like some kind of enemy, and didn’t constantly pander to a lowest common denominator while quite blatantly pushing pro-Tory propaganda there might be a bit more interest.

    I’ve been trying to watch a lot more recently with the Tory leadership race going on and honestly its just painful. The biases and disconnect from any notion of relevance to real day to day life have become absurdly blatant. You get better coverage watching foreign news channels than you do watching our own domestic content.

  3. Which will make them easily to manipulate in the future if it continues. So much of what’s on TikTok is nonsense. There’s even whole channels which specialise in debunking the volume of crap shared…

  4. There are some people on social media actually doing a good job with fact checking and making sure they cover all sides then there’s the majority of them who just scream some shite with zero fact checking

  5. Traditional news channels are both repetitive and utterly draining and depressing, so this is unsurprising. Social media is what you make it. Plenty of people on Tiktok and Insta are explaining things in easy to understand language and succinctly, instead of staring into your soul grimly while giving you a truncated version that follows their biases like many of the news stations do nowadays.

    Hell, I’m far from being a teenager and I’d far rather watch someone on a social media platform react incredulously to say, a video of Boris actually speaking, rather than watching an edited newsclip that cuts around him to make him sound more professional and reasonable with cleaned up quotes and a severe voiceover.

  6. I feel like ‘news’ is being misinterpreted by Ofcom here as well to mean ‘current events’. If I want news on what my favourite singer is releasing next for example, I’m going straight to their social media. The likelihood of it being on the BBC news is pretty low unless its Ed Sheeran or Adele!

  7. So much social media is US generated garbage, ignorance and falsehoods though.

    As opposed to homegrown bias.

    TIL that the earth is flat, Jesus is about to return to save humanity, the Four Horsemen are here, evolution is a lie made up by corporations – as is global climate change, men can have babies, women can’t have abortions and finally that Covid doesn’t exist. Oh, and Walmart have got a sale on for ammunition and baby wipes, with an extra 5% off if you use your local church credit card.

    But at the end of the day, they have all become echo chambers. Even, sadly, this fine platform.

  8. I like how they start by saying mainstream media lies to you.

    Then everything on tiktoc and instagram is gosbul.

  9. i mean yeah fair enough? the news is about as believeable as some random person on tiktok anyway, they both exaggerate the truth to get views/readers

    plus the news is constantly “trans people bad” or “someone has died… again”, barely anything positive or anything that improves anyone’s day is ever shown on the news, so why bother

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