Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that could lead to the U.S. banning the social platform Tik Tok entirely. TikTok has concerning ties to the Chinese government (CCP).
The vote was 352-65, with one member, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), voting present, which Townhall covered.
“Communist China is America’s largest geopolitical foe and is using technology to actively undermine America’s economy and security," GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in a statement after the vote.
New numbers from Pew Research that were published this week show that more Americans, especially young adults, are regularly getting their news from TikTok.
According to Pew Research, about four in 10 young adults in the United States now regularly get their news from TikTok. Overall, the share of adults who regularly get their news from TikTok has grown to 17 percent.
No social media platform the organization has studied has seen faster growth in the share of Americans who regularly turn to it for news, Pew Research noted (via Pew Research):
In just four years, the share of adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has grown about fivefold, from 3% in 2020 to 17% in 2024.
TikTok, primarily known for short-form video sharing, is especially popular among teens – 63% of whom report ever using the platform – and young adults.
Young adults also stand out when it comes to turning to TikTok for news. Today, 39% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news there, compared with much smaller shares of adults ages 30 to 49 (19%), 50 to 64 (9%) and 65 and older (3%).
News consumption is also trending upward when looking at TikTok users, specifically. Around half of TikTok users (52%) now say they regularly get news there, up from 43% last year and just 22% in 2020. TikTok users are now more likely to get news from TikTok than Facebook users are to get news from Facebook. Still, TikTok users are less likely than users of X (formerly Twitter) to get news on the site.
Townhall covered how most voters born in Generation Z said in a new poll conducted by SocialSphere that they oppose a federal ban on the platform TikTok. The same group of voters also said they are concerned about the Chinese government’s influence on the platform.
The poll found that 51 percent of Gen Z voters ages 18 to 26 are concerned about the influence the CCP has over the video-sharing platform. Sixty-four percent of Millennial voters ages 27 to 42 felt the same way. But, only 34 percent of Gen Z voters said they’d support a federal ban on the app. Forty-nine percent of Millennial voters said they’d support such a ban.
