How publishers are learning to create and distribute news on TikTok

 THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART FIVE.

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How publishers are learning to create and distribute news on TikTok - Reuters Institute: “TikTok is currently one of the world’s fastest-growing social networks with its addictive algorithm surfacing an endless stream of short, entertaining videos. Until recently the network had a reputation built almost exclusively on fast-moving, funny or musical memes, but stories such as Black Lives Matter, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine have helped make news a much bigger part of the mix. Changes to the platform, enabling longer videos and the promotion of live streams, have also made TikTok more attractive for news publishers looking to engage younger audiences.

 Despite this, our Reuters Institute Digital News Report research suggests that news on TikTok is still mostly generated by social media influencers, activists, or ordinary people rather than by journalists. Qualitative studies of younger consumers show that although TikTok is loved for its humour and engaging presentation, many worry about the credibility of the information they see there and the potential for misinformation and disinformation.Understanding the nature of news on any social platform is a huge endeavour given the highly personalised nature of the experience and the limited availability of public data. 

Partly for these reasons, in this report we focus mainly on the production of content for TikTok by publishers, as well as some independent news creators. We have tracked the extent of publisher activity across more than 40 countries, one of the first attempts to do this, and interviewed some of the most successful news organisations such as the Washington Post, Sky News, and Le Mondeabout their motivations and key learnings…”

1. Introduction and Key Findings | 2 . Methodology | 3. How and why publishers are moving onto TikTok | 4. TikTok’s ‘magic’ algorithm – how it works | 5. What strategies are publishers pursuing on TikTok? | 6. News creators and activists  | 7. What next for TikTok and news? | Conclusion | About the author | Acknowledgements | Appendix A  – List of interviewees | Appendix B – List of top publishers by country | Download PDF

What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time

New York Times Opinion: “The past few weeks, watching people weigh alternatives to Twitter, I’ve been reminded of a moment that occurs in every episode of “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.” She makes her clients put every piece of clothing they own into a giant (often horrifying) pile before going through it, holding and addressing each garment individually. Although Kondo is sometimes written off as a minimalist who tells you to get rid of everything, to me, her work has more to do with intention and cultivating meaningful ties to the things you have. 

Clients on the show often end up reckoning with their identities — who they are and who they want to be — and with fundamental shifts they’ve been too scared or busy to take on. For Kondo, to arrange your things is to arrange your best self and your idea of the good life. This lesson from offline spaces can be applied to digital habits, especially the ones that shape our experience of time. ‌

Which digital rhythms are we actively following because they make us feel good, and which are we entrained to? Entrainment, a term that originated in biology and then spread to the social sciences, refers to the alignment of an organism’s physiology or behavior with a cycle; the most familiar example would be our circadian rhythm. The signal driving entrainment, in this case light and dark, is called a “zeitgeber” (German for “time giver”)…”