This Is the News From TikTok

The Atlantic

2 days ago

When he learned one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what's bad and what's good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump's Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president's post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump's call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car.
Parnas wasn't adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed—plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing's interests. TikTok's algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos—an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events.
Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults—and 39 percent of adults under 30—regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on 'newsfluencer s' such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don't use TikTok.
Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden's well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan's ballad for the lovestruck, 'Casual,' played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as 'edits'—minute-long music montages—on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck' blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning?
Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what's going on in the world—that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. 'A lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,' Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. 'That, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.' And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm.
Parnas, who is 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump's first term. 'I love my dad,' Aaron Parnas has said. 'And I'm not my dad.') C-SPAN is on 'all day every day.' And he's enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone's alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the 'news' category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and this magazine's editor in chief.
Still, Parnas's TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas's 24/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There's no 'Good evening' or 'Welcome.' But he's reaching an audience who other media don't: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are 'young people who don't watch the news and never have and never will.' He added, 'They just don't have the attention span to.'
Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a 'world-class hater.' Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. 'You're getting less propagandized,' he told me. 'It's not pushing an agenda.' Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris's presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. 'I wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite–style of reporting,' he told me. 'So that's what I do.' For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you'd have to watch his TikToks at half speed.
If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term 'jo urnalisming' to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing—such as a 'patriot' New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck.
'Do I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,' Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she's a fan of Mac because he offers 'a more glamorous way to get the news'—and a quick, convenient way. 'I don't have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,' Stringfield said.
Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z's media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. 'The default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,' he said. 'Load me up. I'll interrupt it when I see something interesting.' On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly.
The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. 'South Carolina can cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,' she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post 's TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he's leaving to set up his own online-video company —a testament to the demand for this new style of content.
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The Post 's embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper's stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. 'I'll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,' he said. 'But if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I'll probably Google it.'
Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. 'There's no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,' he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok's factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok's news search results contained misinformation—but no user I spoke with bothers with the app's search function.
Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn't yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok's Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office.
In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news. On TikTok, 'news is anything that's new,' Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay.