Opinion: What happens when TikTok is your main source of news and information

We can’t rely on social media platforms to solve the problem of misinformation — they can’t even be trusted to police themselves. — Dreamstime/TNS

On TikTok you’re liable to find restaurant recommendations, lip-syncing snippets and false claims stating that Covid-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue and that crisis actors faked the Uvalde school shooting. TikTok, along with Instagram, is where Gen Z searches for information and entertainment. They often come up with a blurry mix between fact and fiction.

The Internet is how Gen Z becomes informed — and too often misinformed — about the world. Nearly 40% of this generation, young people born between the late 1990s and early 2000s, prefers using TikTok and Instagram as their search engines, according to recently released internal data from Google.