China’s TikTok, Instagram are Top News Sources for Teenagers in Britain

The TikTok logo is displayed on a smartphone in front of the national flag of China in thi
Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The controversial Chinese short-form video app TikTok has shot up the list of news sources for British teenagers, alongside Instagram and Youtube.

A report from the UK broadcasting and telecommunications regulator Ofcom has found that teenagers are turning off television news in favour of digital alternatives. The survey found that 29 per cent of British teens turned to Instagram for their news, with 28 per cent favouring either TikTok or YouTube.

Between 2020 and 2022, TikTok has seen the largest growth of any news source in the UK, climbing from 0.8 million adults in 2020 to 3.9 million adults in 2022, which according to the broadcasting regulator is the same amount that use the Sky News website or app.

The massive growth has been mainly driven by the use of those in younger age brackets, with 16 to 24-year-olds comprising of half of the news consumers on the platform. Those TikTok users who use it as their primary news source said that they were more likely to collect news from “people they follow”(44 per cent) as opposed to “news organisations”(24 per cent), with traditional broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Sky News all launching news channels on the app.

Though it is has grown into one of the top news sources for younger people, less than one third (30 per cent) said that they trusted the news they found on TikTok.

“Teenagers today are increasingly unlikely to pick up a newspaper or tune into TV News, instead preferring to keep up-to-date by scrolling through their social feeds,” said Yih-Choung Teh, Ofcom’s Group Director for Strategy and Research.

“And while youngsters find news on social media to be less reliable, they rate these services more highly for serving up a range of opinions on the day’s topical stories.”

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has come under increasing scrutiny after it was revealed last month that the company did indeed access data of users in the United States, confirming long-standing warnings from former President Donald Trump, who attempted to ban the app from America but was blocked by a judge and had the plan scrapped after Democrat Joe Biden took office.

Despite TikTok’s insistence that it would separate its Western focussed app and the local Chinese version, known as Dǒuyīn, leaked recordings last month claimed to show that the company was routing “100 per cent” of US data through Chinese servers, raising concerns about the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok as a means of spying on Americans.

This prompted FCC chairman Brendan Carr to call on Google and Apple to ban the application from their app stores, arguing that it merely uses the video sharing service as “sheep’s clothing” and that its true purpose was to harvest “swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.”

This backs up previous warnings from former MI6 chief Nigel Inskter, who said in 2020 that TikTok could be used as a backdoor to gain access personal information of British politicians, even if it is merely their younger family members that have signed up to the app.

“Where the Chinese intelligence services are very strong is in identifying non-obvious entry points to certain targets,” Mr Inkster explained.

Ignoring such security warnings, the left-wing Labour Party ordered all MPs to create their own TikTok accounts last year, after pranksters began setting up parody accounts of prominent politicians including London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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