Young People Get Their News from TikTok. That’s a Huge Problem for Democrats.

Democrats are doing the most awkward TikTok dance.

The House’s Wednesday vote to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social media behemoth to an American entity has put Democrats from President Biden on down in a tough spot. Most are now on record backing a bill that could shutter a fast-growing platform that’s most popular with the young voters they so badly need.

TikTok users aren’t just kids mindlessly scrolling dance videos. Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18–29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022—a number that’s almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18–29 use the app.

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