Author: Mayank
Abstract
This paper examines the reconfiguration of news consumption through short-form video platforms, analyzing TikTok’s algorithmic discovery paradigm, the emergence of news influencers as primary information intermediaries, format constraints on journalistic quality, implications for journalistic authority, and governance challenges. Drawing on Reuters Institute DNR 2025 data documenting that social media has overtaken television as the primary U.S. news source and Pew Research Center findings that 20 percent of U.S. adults regularly get news on TikTok, the study analyzes the structural dynamics of algorithmic news distribution in entertainment-optimized platform environments. The paper demonstrates that TikTok’s content graph-based recommendation system creates a fundamentally different information architecture from both traditional media gatekeeping and social graph-based social media distribution, with implications for the institutional foundations of democratic information systems.
Keywords: short-form video, TikTok, news consumption, algorithmic discovery, journalistic authority, digital media formats, news influencers, platform news, content graph, democratic information.
