1 in 5 Americans now regularly get news on TikTok, up sharply from 2020

A fifth of U.S. adults now regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020. In fact, during that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

TikTok is primarily known for short-form video sharing and is especially popular among teens – 63% of whom report ever using the platform.

How we did this

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the ways Americans get news in a digital age. The Center regularly studies the platforms and social media sites Americans use to get news. This also continues our work on measuring news consumption online. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,153 U.S. adults from Aug. 18 to 24, 2025.

Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, presidential vote (among voters), social media site use and other factors. Read more about the ATP’s methodology and how we use the NPORS (National Public Opinion Reference Survey) to weight our social media data.

Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.

But it has also become a popular news source for young adults. In our new survey, 43% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news there, up from 9% in 2020.

Adults ages 30 to 49 have also increasingly been getting news on TikTok: A quarter now say they do so regularly, up from just 2% five years ago. Much smaller shares of adults ages 50 to 64 and 65 and older say they regularly get news there (10% and 3%, respectively, as of this year).

When looking at adult TikTok users specifically, news consumption has also increased sharply in recent years. More than half of TikTok users (55%) now say they regularly get news on the platform, up from 22% in 2020. TikTok is now on par with several other social media sites – including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Truth Social – in the share of its adult users who regularly get news there.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published Nov. 15, 2023. Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.