In two years, the use of TikTok to obtain information has gone from 1% to 7% for those over 16 years of age in the United Kingdom, according to the annual report on news consumption carried out by the communications regulator (Ofcom). That evolution keeps the platform still a relatively minor environment in that field but its is the biggest increase of all the included sources. Plus Almost half of those who use it to find out what is happening turn to the independent creators that it welcomes more than to conventional media.
The detail of these data reveals that it is mostly young people between 16 and 24 years of age who drive this growth. For them, it is the sixth most used source of information, with 27% that at the moment keeps it far from 46% of Instagram or 40% of Facebook. But in the segment between 12 and 15 years old, the Chinese platform is the second most usedwith a 28% share that equals YouTube and leaves it slightly behind Instagram’s 29%.
The latter represents a turnaround from the traditional leadership of BBC One / BBC Two in that group. In five years they have gone from concentrating the use of 45% of that generation to the 24% recorded in the current edition of the study. Now they make up the fifth option on the list, also behind ITV and ahead of Facebook or Snapchat.
Yih-Choung Tea, director of Strategy and Research at Ofcom, contextualizes these trends with the fact that “it is increasingly unlikely that today’s adolescents use a newspaper or tune in to television, they prefer to keep up to date through their social networks”. And he also points out that they do not carry out this practice oblivious to the reality that they can find less reliable information on those platforms, but they do value the possibility of finding different points of view on the issues of the day.
Contributing to the latter is that conventional media is a minority source to follow on TikTok. Only 24% of those who say they consume information on the platform do so primarily through themfar behind the 44% who indicate that other people are their reference, and also the 32% who trust their judgment to friends and family.
The Ofcom figures are in line with what has been happening in the US, where a quarter of adults indicate that they regularly use TikTok for information. Almost half of those belonging to the generations millennial yz sign that habitas indicated by the analysis company Forrester Research.
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