By Thomas Walters, Founder and CEO of Billion Dollar Boy

Like all media consumption, the news is increasingly transitioning away from linear channels to digital platforms – we’ve seen it in the decline of print readership and TV viewership coinciding with the rise in popularity of social media platforms like TikTok, which currently has one billion monthly active users worldwide.

Mirroring the fast consumption culture we see in a lot of society, users like to consume bite-sized content while on-the-go – including news.

This cultural shift caters well to the models of social media platforms such as TikTok, which favours short form video content, as opposed to traditional news outlets which typically operates at regular intervals such as 1 o’clock news bulletins or daily print newspapers. 

Consumers have also become accustomed to receiving recommended content which is based on an algorithmic analysis of a user’s preferences, rather than the editorially curated news feeds of mainstream outlets.

That means users are being fed information that appeals to their interests, making news on social media more relevant to each individual user.

On the face of it there are benefits. News is increasingly becoming fragmented and democratised, making it more accessible and engaging a broader audience in current affairs.

We often see news is broken first on social media, before then being shared by traditional news outlets, and we see creators are able to break down complex and important news stories into easily digestible short videos.

However, these benefits need to be considered alongside the concerns that these consumption habits also raise – in particular around the rise of misinformation, which we’ve seen in action with the recent far right riots in the UK.

This is particularly problematic at a time of global conflict and elections.

Some startling research lays this problem bare. Although there isn’t necessarily a majority of US users accessing social media specifically for news, at least half admit to consuming news at least sometimes from social.

At the same time, two-thirds (64%) of US internet users are aware that disinformation and fake news is most widespread on social platforms. In summary, users are consuming news regularly on social media platforms regardless of the knowledge of its potential inaccuracy.

It also comes at a time, when Meta is de-emphasising news in feeds on Facebook and Instagram, and even blocking news content altogether in some cases, while other social media platforms are cutting fact-checking and moderation. Between 2022 and 2023, Meta, X and YouTube eliminated 17 policies designed to reduce hate speech, misinformation and harassment.

Meanwhile, trusted traditional news outlets are sadly making redundancies due to declining revenues as a result of our changing media consumption habits. In January, for example, some 528 journalists were laid off after the loss in 2023 of 3,087 print, digital and broadcast jobs, the most annually since 2020. 

The power of influencers needs to be considered. Contrasting The New York Times’s 785,00 followers on TikTok, with the popularity of the likes of Dylan Page, aka News Daddy, who has 12 million followers, we can see the power of creators as news outlets.

They are highly trusted by their followers, in some cases and in particular among younger demographics, more so than news publishers like the New York Times. The peer-to-peer nature of TikTok means that users often turn to the platform for recommendations and advice from people they perceive as peers rather than experts. But this rise in creator-led short-video news content, lacks regulation and the creators are not trained journalists, and could be impartial rather than objective.

If we can better regulate news and information on social media, we can harness its potential for engaging mass audiences. Traditional news outlets will regardless need to adapt their models increasingly to short form video and become social media first.