College students are choosing TikTok and Instagram over newspapers and magazines. And though they know social media is rife with misinformation, they still won’t give it up. College students are choosing TikTok and Instagram over newspapers and magazines. And though they know social media is rife with misinformation, they still won’t give it up.
AnkitAnkit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in the United Kingdom, Page began posting content on TikTok in August 2020 and has since grown his “News Daddy Empire,” his posts amassing over 1.5 billion likes. His content spans breaking news, politics, pop culture, and sometimes, personal workout videos — delivered in the increasingly common, enthusiastic “YouTube accent.” While Page doesn’t explicitly cite his sources in every video, News Daddy appears to get his information from a mix of conventional news outlets, social media, and other influencers.
As a computer science major, Khanal says he’s cautious of algorithms and their effects on media consumption. He even wrote and delivered a speech on the topic to his peers for one of his classes. The thesis: “If you realize it or not, algorithms are determining everything on social media. From the content that you interact with to the opinions you form on the app. They are secretly affecting your life in ways that can be harmful.” The irony is not lost on him. Khanal understands TikTok is not always a reliable source; his presentation thoroughly explained how misinformation is quick to spread on social media. If Khanal wants to fact-check a video, he browses the comment section. “Most of the time, if the video is big enough, you will see something in the top comments telling you, like, ‘Hey, this is just wrong.’ That’s when I would actually look.”
And yet, rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, he still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices. In January of this year, the survey results were published, showing that social media is a “top news source” for nearly three in four students. Of those surveyed, “half at least somewhat trust platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to deliver that news and other critical information accurately.” And word of mouth ranked second among students’ most popular news sources, an avenue for half of those surveyed. Legacy media, primarily newspapers, on the other hand, are regular news sources for just two in 10 students, even though they indicate that newspapers are more likely to convey accurate information.
Professor Karen North, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg digital media program, agrees with the study’s findings. At the beginning of each of her classes, North discusses with her students the day’s most relevant headlines. She asks them where they caught wind of those events. The three most common answers among her students each semester: “They get their news from Instagram and TikTok. And from their professors.” But North says classroom newsgetting is a distant third, far behind social media’s grip on student news sourcing culture.
"I see the TikTok, I see more, I get interested, I look it up online."
Zau Lahtaw, a junior at Syracuse University, says he also gets his news from scrolling on TikTok, primarily from Dylan Page, as well as from a talking fish — styled after the animated news anchor that delivers “breaking news” in SpongeBob SquarePants. “I don’t know. It’s just funny,” Lahtaw says.
There are several popular talking fish accounts on Instagram, the most popular of which — @realtalkingfish, self-titled “America’s #1 news source!” — uploads daily news snippets to its 1.4 million followers. But there are countless pages across both Instagram and TikTok that deploy an AI-generated version of Bikini Bottom’s aquatic anchor to reach millions of viewers. Lahtaw says he doesn’t actively search for these pages, but on TikTok, the videos pop up on his feed anyway. And if the story interests him, he’ll sit through the video. That’s how he learned of Israel’s strikes on military and nuclear facilities in Iran. Lahtaw had been scrolling through his TikTok For You page — as he usually does for two to three hours a day — when he came across the fish news anchor explaining the attack had transpired earlier that morning. Lahtaw searched Google to check if the attack was real, and remembers confirming that it was, though he can’t recall if he’d read an article from CNN or ABC.
Just over a week later, Lahtaw learned from News Daddy that the US launched military strikes against Iran. After that first video, his feed was immediately flooded with posts about getting drafted for a potential World War III. He watched a few of these videos before returning to Google to verify that the draft was confined to memes. “I see the TikTok, I see more, I get interested, I look it up online.”
The TikTok-to-Google pipeline is not unique to Lahtaw. Among the 18 college students I spoke to for this story, this fact-checking funnel was overwhelmingly pervasive; all students were on either TikTok or Instagram or both and often turned to Google after seeing news on their feeds that they wanted to verify. North says her students do similarly, although most don’t google to read articles: “They search or google things and they only read, for the most part, the AI response as a shortcut, and they just assume that it’s correct.” She says, for her students, “AI is the new sort of Wikipedia.”
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