My First Blog Post

Tik Tok is a form of social media that has burst onto the scene in recent years, mostly for entertainment purposes, but can be utilized for news if used effectively. In my personal opinion, Tik Tok is less valuable of a ‘news source’ than twitter because most people do not want to see news on Tik Tok. I know from personal experience, when I am scrolling through Tik Tok and come across a news video or a ‘non-entertainment’ clip, I scroll right past it and don’t even think twice. One thing that would need to happen for Tik Tok to become a more valuable news source would be a huge rebrand of the app, because in the past, it has been advertised as an ‘entertainment’ app, or an app to have fun and create content.

As far as using teens to create videos for politics and help jumpstart social media campaigns, I think there are a lot of potential red flags. The most glaring one being political ignorance, or lack of knowledge in what they are saying on the app. If you give a teenager money to say something on a social media, they’ll say just about anything even if they do not know or believe in what they are saying. But at the same time they can be a very impressionable content creater to the audience, because if teens see other teens who are aligned with a certain political figure, they are more than likely to be influenced by that even if they have not formed their own opinion. This is a genius move by political parties, because there is not a more ignorant voter than kids who just turned eighteen and can legally vote for the first times in their entire lives.

Buzzfeed varies from other news organizations on Tik Tok because they aren’t trying to be ‘cool’ on the app, Buzzfeed is close enough to millenials that they don’t have to try tacky gimmicks to draw in younger crowds, they just produce content that younger audiences want to consume.