This article is part of Concentrate's Voices of Youth series, which features content created by Washtenaw County youth in partnership with Concentrate staff mentors. This story was created as part of Voices of Youth's partnership with Washtenaw My Brother's Keeper and the Washtenaw Intermediate School District's summer Freedom School program. In this installment, Freedom School project editor Aaron Foley reflects on what he learned about how Freedom School students consume news.

By now, most folks should know how TikTok, the video and streaming app, works. And also by now, it should be accepted that folks of all ages use it.

It was known solely as a playground for young folks showing off dance moves until it wasn’t. TikTok is still that; scrollers of the app will still find strangers across the world attempting their smoothest moves to whatever routine might be trending. But the app is also a tool for real estate agents to show off listings, cooks to demonstrate recipes, musical artists to engage with fans, college students to show off dorm decor, elders to give advice from decades of wisdom.

Is there anyone who isn’t using TikTok? To my surprise, there are some who don’t: young folks.

During Concentrate’s Voices of Youth Freedom School summer program facilitated by Washtenaw My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative housed at the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, I helped teach about a dozen youth the basics of journalism, with the goal of getting some of them published here in Concentrate.

To disseminate news means one has to be a news consumer to some extent. So, after firmly defining what exactly "news" is, one question I asked the class in the beginning was: Where do you get your news?

Most kids said YouTube, Instagram, or catching radio reports with a parent or guardian listening in the car. It has long been known that television news — which is where a younger version of me consumed the most news, way back in the Stone Age of the ‘90s — is no longer a primary destination for younger generations. Attention spans are shorter, streaming options have exploded, we’re all too busy regardless of how old we are, and there are several other mediums trying to capture everyone’s attention. 

Technology has evolved too. As one of our youth reporters points out, video games — which were analog, and not nearly as advanced, when I was a kid — occupy a lot of screen time for today’s youth. The days of playing a little bit of "Super Mario World" before sitting down with the adults in the house to watch Mort Crim and Carmen Harlan — both retired — deliver the news of the day before bedtime are long gone.

It’s why news organizations and distributors of misinformation — we’ll revisit the latter shortly — have turned to bite-sized reports on TikTok as a means of reaching younger consumers. To my surprise, many of the youth in the Freedom School program said they barely used TikTok at all, if they even had the app. And if they used TikTok, which by my anecdotal tally came in third place behind the aforementioned Instagram or YouTube, it certainly wasn’t for dancing. 

Some of the kids only used TikTok for relatively simple, age-appropriate purposes. Some liked to watch animal videos and learn about science that way, whether by following accounts operated by zoos or simply aggregators of nature content. Some used it as a tool for learning about geography and different cultures; think of TikTok as a self-guided "Carmen Sandiego." A lot used it as an extension of what they primarily consume on YouTube, which included watching streams of gamers playing video games in real time. 

On one hand, this is oddly comforting. As a journalist, there is nothing more terrifying to me than the rapid spread of disinformation and misinformation through apps like TikTok, where bad actors can easily convince vulnerable people of any age of something that simply isn’t fact. (TikTok certainly isn’t exempt from this; apps like X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook are hubs for misinformation and disinformation as well.) It means that TikTok’s youngest users are less likely to fall for conspiracy theories or other myths, which could make them smarter news consumers in the future. (And though I’m not a parent, I can’t help but feel assured that some younger folks’ algorithms are tuned strictly to family-friendly content.)

On the other hand, younger consumers are still getting a lot of content from the device in their hands. I do have concern that if they’re not getting news from the increasingly news-heavy TikTok, where are they getting it from? Instagram, which seems to be young folks’ app of choice (which I still have to wrap my millennial brain around; this is still a photo-dump app in my mind!) and Facebook are both Meta apps. For those who don’t pay attention to tech news, this means both apps are owned by the same conglomerate, which also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp. Misinformation goes wildly unchecked on all three apps, and algorithms can easily skew to present users with conspiracy theories. And then there’s YouTube, which has long been under scrutiny for recommending content from popular users who spew harmful rhetoric.

That leaves two challenges to be addressed. News organizations should continue to figure out how to capture the youngest audiences on social media, and understand that everything can’t be done with TikTok alone. The second challenge is at home, where adults should be judicious about how news is shared on the TV, in the car, and on the phone, and making sure that accurate information is omnipresent no matter the medium.

If nothing else, know this: Whatever stereotype you held about TikTok being a dancing app is about as old and stale as the cabbage patch or the butterfly. But then again, all those ‘80s and ‘90s dance moves are coming back around, too.

Aaron Foley is the managing editor of Model D and the project editor for Concentrate's Voices of Youth Freedom school project.

Photo by Jamall Bufford.