A small but growing share of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on TikTok. This is in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.
In just three years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.
TikTok, primarily known for short-form video sharing, has become especially popular among teens – two-thirds of whom report ever using the platform – as well as young adults.
To examine the ways Americans get news in a digital age, Pew Research Center surveyed 8,842 U.S. adults from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, 2023. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
In the past, we have conducted similar research about Americans’ use of social media for news. This survey continues to explore the same topics but, but our approach has evolved to use slightly different question wording, starting in our 2020 survey. As a result, some of these measures cannot be directly compared with findings prior to 2020. These changes in question wording reflect the Center’s efforts to improve the way we measure news consumption.
Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Among adults, those ages 18 to 29 are most likely to say they regularly get news on TikTok. About a third of Americans in this age group (32%) say they regularly get news there, a higher share than in years before. This compares with 15% of those ages 30 to 49, 7% of those 50 to 64 and just 3% of those 65 and older.
More of TikTok’s U.S. adult users are getting news there as well. Currently, 43% of TikTok users say they regularly get news on the site, up from 33% who said the same in 2022. TikTok users are now just as likely to get news from TikTok as Facebook users are to get news from Facebook. Still, TikTok users are less likely than users of X, formerly Twitter, to get news on the site.
Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
