GRANGER students love TikTok! Many styles and new ideas are coming from the famous social media platform every day.
TikTok is one of the most well-known social media platforms worldwide. TikTok users like to create videos and share them with their communities, expressing their likes and dislikes and influencing each other to buy certain products.
Over 5.8 billion people worldwide have TikTok downloaded on their devices and spend a lot of time scrolling. While the platform can shape creativity and mindsets, there can be ups and downs in the accuracy of the information it provides.
Recurring trends on TikTok are becoming more common every day. “I feel like TikTok is a good place for posting stuff, you know? It gave me more confidence,” Bryan Vega (11) said.
Many people think TikTok shouldn’t be used as a news source. “Other people like TikTok, but I don’t think people should rely on TikTok for their information or news because it could be all fake. People lie all the time!” Vega added.
Eli Patrick (11) says TikTok isn’t reliable for news. “I don’t usually depend on information from sources like that — it’s really unreliable, to be honest,” Patrick said. TikTok can also be fun, though. “I think TikTok evolves stuff I already like, though, like new music, artists, and even songs on there,” he said. Often, going to a reliable source for information is better than listening to random people on the internet.
Most students agree that TikTok influences how they think, but some disagree entirely. “I think TikTok has influenced me in many ways, because sometimes my opinion changes based on the videos I watch — in some way I actually learn from TikTok, but most of the time the content on there is very inaccurate,” Camilia De Leon Orozco (11) said.
The app can shift opinions and introduce different views, affecting how people think and where they get their information or news. “I wouldn’t use TikTok as a source for news. I do believe that it has a way of teaching people, but it shouldn’t be the first thing that you go for when hearing about new news,” Orozco said.
TikTok can be useful for so many reasons, hacks being one of them. “TikTok does make me do things I wouldn’t regularly do, but 99% of the time, it is just harmless things like hacks or easier ways to do things that I can use in my daily life,” Logan Spencer (11) said. “I currently use it as a source for many things, and I often search up how to do them on TikTok,” he said. Spencer says that the use of TikTok is essential and does use it as his source of information.
TikTok is such a great source of entertainment and can be a way to learn, but there are mixed opinions on whether it’s a reliable news source.
