Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Ready for some real News?
Last week, mainstream media, and the old people who tun it, spun into full-scale panic over a TikTok trend where TikTokers who’ve read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” talked about how he may have had some valid points.
Let me be clear: I don’t think doing this is a good idea. I believe that the people who did this have terrible judgement. I do not believe that the deranged nepo-baby who planned 9/11 has any valid points.
However, what’s really important to note about this incident is that very few people did this. And despite traditional media claiming that “massive TikTok influencers are racking up millions of views on these videos,” these influencers were not “massive” and the videos they posted garnered relatively insignificant numbers.
In fact, the main reason interest in the videos rose and the letter went viral is because mainstream media outlets and older pundits posted the videos on other social media platforms - notably Twitter and Facebook - and in publications like the NY Post, hoping to generate clicks for themselves.
A TikTok user with 371 followers posted a video where she read parts of bin Laden’s “Letter to America.” By Wednesday night, the letter had become a point of discussion among left-wing creators on TikTok, with some saying its critiques of American foreign policy had opened their eyes to a history they’d never learned.
But the letter didn’t rank among TikTok’s top trends. Videos with the #lettertoamerica hashtag had been seen only about 2 million times — a low count for a wildly popular app with 150 million accounts in the United States alone, and 1.7 billion users worldwide.
Then, the journalist Yashar Ali shared a compilation he’d made of the TikTok videos in a post on Twitter. That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. By Thursday afternoon, when TikTok announced it had banned the hashtag and dozens of similar variations, TikTok videos tagged #lettertoamerica had gained more than 15 million views.
(As a point of comparison, the TikTok makeup trend #uncannyvalley now has 1.2 billion views, and the video that started it has more than 25 million views, 4 million likes and 25,000 comments.)
Let’s be honest, we’ve all seen equally stupid shit posted and shared by Boomers, GenXers and Millennials on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every damn day. But despite the trend’s low numbers, for the chattering class who lives on juicy clickbait, this it was too sexy a target to pass up. Gen Zers reading propaganda from the world’s most infamous terrorist, taking it entirely out of context, and posting misguided stuff on the planet’s hottest social media platform? Guaranteed likes and reposts baby!
Sure, there was some buzz about the letter and the videos prior to Yashar Ali’s (Ali is a 43 year old Millennial btw) hyper-hyperbolic propagandist promotion of the trend and the videos. Yet, as interwebs researcher Ryan Broderick demonstrated, “interest in the trend it was plateauing. After his tweet the interest doubled.”
This episode epitomizes a current panic among “the olds” over the social media and news consumption habits of Generation Z, which, as it turns out, are as misinformed as Yashir Ali’s clickbait-driven bin Laden post.
In a recent wave of breathless commentary, journalists, mainstream media headline writers, and older internet “thought leaders” have been hysterically decrying Gen Z’s “reliance on TikTok as their main source of news.” The source of their aging angst is a recent study from Pew Research Center, which showed that young people’s use of TikTok for news and current events is (in fact) increasing. As Eleanor Hawkins of Axios correctly noted “the number of TikTok users who consume news through the platform has nearly doubled since 2020.” She also accurately points out that 32% of 18-29 year olds now “regularly get their news from TikTok.”
However, while Hawkins, Axios, and a slew of opportunist professional mainstream media pundits clamor to use this study to denigrate the judgement of all people under the age of 30, it is abundantly clear that, in their rush to look down their aging noses at Gen Z, they have not read the whole study nor examined what its data actually says. Rather, per an actual trend, in order stay in the zeitgeist, these pundits simply read the hot headline and then proceed to cut and paste its one, simplified, yet incorrect point.
Let’s start by zooming out and looking at what the study truly says, generally, about Americans’ social media news consumption.
Twice as many Americans now “regularly get their news” from Facebook as from TikTok. Almost 2X as many get their news from YouTube as the Tok, and nearly as many Americans get news about current events from the cesspool formerly known as Twitter as they do TikTok. When you combine the platforms owned by Meta, 49% of Americans say they “regularly get their news” from platforms controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who famously has said that fake news is free speech. Axios failed to mention this, as have all the writers and so-called thought-leaders who have quoted their piece.
Here’s what this looks like when you break it down to the pure numbers of Americans who “get their news” from social media…
103 million Americans say they regularly get their news from Facebook. That’s almost twice the population of the UK. 89 million Americans get their information on world events from YouTube - whose misinformation policies are as consistent as a yoyo. That’s more than twice the number of people who live in Canada.
More than one-third of American women “regularly” get their news from lightly-moderated Facebook, much more than twice that on TikTok. 32% of American men get their current events info from YouTube, nearly 3X TikTok, and 5% more men in the US now get their news on Twitter. Twitter. But if you’re looking for the panicked, screaming headlines about AMERICAN WOMEN RELYING ON FACEBOOK FOR THEIR NEWS, you’d be searching in vain.
However, when you take an even deeper look, specifically at Gen Z’s usage of social media for their news, you see that the admonitions and dire warnings of Ali, Hawkins and their cohort of Gen Z TikTok alarmists have even less merit.
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