More U.S. youth are relying on TikTok for news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, which says young adults increasingly believe the short-form social video platform exposes them to information they don’t see elsewhere, even though they don’t primarily associate it with news. Among those who use TikTok, only 15 percent cite “news” as a major incentive for using the app. The study, which examines American news consumption on social media platforms, found X to be the most popular news source across all demographics, beating Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as ByteDance’s TikTok.

“Half of U.S. adults say they get news at least sometimes from social media in general, but specific platforms differ widely in structure, content and culture,” notes Pew Research in announcing the study, which focused on news encounters on the four aforementioned “major platforms.”

Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, is the exception among those who say the news is not a significant reason they use the sites, Pew found.

And while “most Facebook and Instagram users say the news that pops up on their feeds is posted by friends, relatives, or other people they know; on X, users are more likely to see news posted by media outlets or reporters,” The Verge says of the study.

The Pew survey suggests that TikTok’s “popularity as a news source is on the rise — as are lawmakers’ concerns about the information users see on the app,” The Verge reports, mentioning that “in April, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok unless its China-based parent company divests from the app within a year.”

In a separate TikTok analysis, Pew found “the vast majority of adult TikTok news consumers are under age 50, including 44 percent who are 18 to 29.” And regardless of whether they look to TikTok for news, most users surveyed say they happen to see news-related content there in the course of a visit.

“TikTok users report seeing funny posts (84 percent) and people’s opinions (80 percent) related to current events at higher rates than news articles (57 percent) or breaking news information (55 percent),” according to Pew Research.

Engadget’s takeaway from the Pew study, and one fielded by the Knight Foundation, is that “news on social media is a fractured mess,” with “much of the news content people see on X and TikTok being driven by those platforms’ recommendation algorithms,” and concludes “publishers are getting far less traffic from social media, and news is increasingly filtered through influencers, meme creators and random algorithmically-surfaced accounts.”