News publications have experienced a significant decline in recent years. The problem causing this is what most Americans are using every day: social media. Social media can be considered a new form to view news media news media, with contributions from younger generations, within the Gen Z and Alpha range.
Teenagers, in particular, are no longer as dependent on reading the news as they used to be. High school students are becoming more dependent on social media to provide them with their dose of information.
A “Social Media and News Intake” survey was conducted with 35 NHS participants. The pie chart below shows the percentage of students who have and have not watched the news within a period of two weeks.
(Gabriel Goulart)
Samara Apuy, a freshman at Norwood High School who uses social media for about three hours every day, states, “I don’t like watching the news; it’s boring. I see it [the news] on TikTok.”
Apuy joins the 86% of students who took the “Social Media and News Intake” survey and agreed that they are updated on the news solely because of social media.
Popular news media like Fox News have been catching up to this trend and starting their own TikTok pages. Fox News began its TikTok profile as recently as July 13th, 2024.
Dylan Page is a popular news account on TikTok. It has over one billion likes. Page reads out the news while stimulating viewers with clips as he talks. It’s simple and effective compared with Fox News which only uploads their news media directly to TikTok the same way it would be streamed to Fox News Media.
Out of all the social media platforms, TikTok seems to be the most targeted to push out news media compared to all the other social media platforms there are. The charts below show the analytics of social media platforms used compared to which one provides the most news form of content.
People are less likely to read the news if they have TikTok. This is because TikTok has a news-spreading algorithm, making more and more people dependent on their given information, as Pew Research Center suggests.
“TikTok is meant to push out more news because the way the algorithm works is based around that. But TikTok is not a good source to get news,” said Freshman Jay Kelly, who averages 6 hours a day on social media.
A social media platform that has been gaining controversy is X, and whether it should remain with its loyal title of being a great source of news. As True Anthem suggests, X has been used to share thoughts and gather news data. However, throughout the year, people are distancing themselves from X and it’s becoming unreliable.
Jay Kelly adds, “I have seen news on X but I don’t really trust anything I’ve seen on X. I hate X so much.”
Despite its reputation, Freshman Andy Alliance continues to read news from X. Alliance is one of the 8% of students who uses X, which is the least popular social media platform among high schoolers according to the survey.
“I heard about the final election results on [X] Twitter,” Alliance said.
Not all teens rely on social media to get the news, though.
“Social media is not made to push out reliable news. Fun fact: Me and my friend did this experiment on a new account to see how many inappropriate things you can get on Instagram. We went through like 200 different videos and more than half were explicit content… Instagram is not made for kids. It’s also not meant to get news,” Freshman Justin James said.
