NÄR NYHETER KNACKAR PÅ ÖPPNAR BEHOVEN DÖRREN. En kvalitativ studie om ungas upplevelse av algoritmstyrt etablerat nyhetsinnehåll på TikTok

Sammanfattning

As news consumption is increasingly shifting to social platforms, the conditions for how news is encountered, interpreted, and understood are changing. Especially among young people, TikTok has become established as a central arena for news consumption, where journalistic content is integrated into a personalized and entertainment-oriented feed. Against this background, it is relevant to examine how young people experience news content on the platform, how their descriptions portray news and ascribe value to the concept, in order to understand the future democratic function of news. This study therefore examines how young people experience, evaluate, and interact with news content from established news sources on TikTok, as well as how these experiences affect their general understanding of what news is. Using a qualitative approach, the study is based on eleven one-to-one semi-structured interviews with young people aged 17–18. By basing the analysis on the participants’ own accounts, the study achieves an in-depth understanding of how news is experienced in a platformized media environment. The theoretical framework consists of Social Media Uses and Gratifications (SMUG) (Whiting and Williams, 2013), in order to analyze the motivations and needs underlying young people’s news consumption on TikTok, as well as the theoretical concepts of platform logic (van Dijck, 2018) and platformization (van Dijck, 2018), in order to understand how the platform’s technical structure shapes the encounter with news content. Together, these perspectives enable an analysis of the dynamic relationship between users’ motivations and the conditions of the platform. The study addresses the following research questions: 1. Why do young people consume news from established news sources on TikTok? 2. How do young people experience their relationship of trust with news content from established news sources on TikTok? 3. How do young people describe the character and features of news from established news sources on TikTok? The results show that young people to a high degree consume news content from established news sources on TikTok on the basis of needs for entertainment, social interaction and passing the time, rather than an explicit need for information. The news content is perceived as entertaining, compressed and personally relatable, without objectivity and credibility necessarily being experienced as lost. Trust in news sources on TikTok is based on previous experiences but is also to a large extent shaped through recognition and repeated exposure in the feed. Furthermore, the study shows that interactivity plays a central role in how news is interpreted and evaluated. Liking, sharing, and engaging with the comment section are described as important elements that influence how the meaning of the content is understood and reinforced. News is thus not encountered in isolation, but as part of a social context. In summary, the study indicates that the dynamic relationship between TikTok’s platform logic and users’ needs contributes to a shift in how news is understood and practiced among young people. When news is integrated into a personalized, social, and entertainment-oriented feed, it to some extent loses its role as institutionalized public information and is ascribed new values linked to personal and social relevance. This points toward a possible redefinition of the concept of news in TikTok’s platformized media environment and raises questions about the future democratic role of news.