Tiktok and all the other social network are inherently a platform for spreading lies. It's a bad fit for quality news.
Of course, I've also read a lot of garbage from those respectable outlets. A lot of slant and a lot of poorly-researched "journalism". This is basically a respectability politics problem; the NPR class is offended more that people have abandoned the trappings of "proper information" than over the information itself.
TikTok is not a place to get news. The culture isn't there, and the UI purposefully doesn't lend to things like sharing sources.
Joe Rogan vs CNN is a good example - that you can apply all the same doubts you have for Tiktok also to conventional news outlets.
And I'm still highly suspect of print media, I try to stick to individual journalists and editors who haven't gotten on my shitlist. Grassroots journalism is so good these days for many issues that it's getting easier to avoid conventional outlets altogether.
This is not true at all. Podcasters have no consequences for deceiving, and can easily recover from it by saying they're not journalists and that ends the subject there.
Try that with a News Outlet, then it would be Joe Rogan saying they're liars and are compromised.
There should be way more accountability for those platforms that have no code of ethics to abide by. Even the self-proclaimed "intellectual dark web" is extremely opinionated about a wide range of subjects way beyond their domain of expertise.
I'm not saying all news outlets are pristine, but comparing journalism, as an institution, and putting it at the same level of accountability as podcasters is just wrong.
> Whether those new sources of truth are better or worse is irrelevant.
Just because the platforms people are using aren't ideal for journalism doesn't mean we can sit down, cross our arms, and say "well I guess we just won't give you news then." TikTok doesn't give special treatment to large or well-established news organizations, but that doesn't preclude such an organization from using the platform to reach an audience.
Social networks are the most democratized ways of spreading information to date. Some of that information is lies, but a lot of people spread fact.
And how do you know which is which, hmmm?
Yellow Journalism is a term for over 100 years ago. People lying with a broad audience is nothing new.
addendum: and how many times have you read a news article from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that's in your area of expertise that's made you go "wow, everything they've said here is wrong, said with an agenda, misinterpreted or other propaganda"?
But social networks have increased that problem by an order of magnitude. And we're seeing the results - the rise of dictatorships all around the world, that use the lie spreading capability of social networks.
We as a collection of societies, worldwide, have not grown our broad-range antibodies/protections against such things, yet.
For example,
huh. turns out theres another nationwide conglomerate running the sinclair playbook
“A [Rutgers Univerity] study […] asserts TikTok’s algorithms promote Chinese Communist Party narratives and suppress content critical of those narrative“
https://www.kqed.org/news/11999273/tiktok-stacking-algorithm...