New Practices of Journalism 2022: Focus On TikTok

On 5 December 2022, Sciences Po's School of Journalism organised its renowned annual New Practices of Journalism Day. This year event focused on a rising social media platform, TikTok. Born in 2018, the platform reached one billion monthly active users in 2021, being the first non Facebook app to reach that milestone. The different guest speakers of the conference explained the opportunities it represents for media and content creators, as well as its limits, some more dangerous than others.

TikTok, an opportunity for traditional media and content creators

Some guest speakers at the event were convinced and convincing that TikTok can be an invaluable tool for traditional media. Sophia Smith Galer, Senior News Reporter at Vice, shared her story and the way her personal account and use of TikTok helped her build her career at the BBC and then Vice. She believes that soon all publishers will be on the latest social media platforms as TikTok, but that there is, for now, a place to grasp. Her main work is to cover news that broke on the platform itself, she creates article explainers to reach out to people and explain why a story went viral (trends, problematic contents, censorship, etc.). Her employer, Vice, also trusts her with in situ reporting by sending her on some events, for a vertical first deployment that is quite rare in the media industry. 

Garance Pardigon, another speaker, works for an even more traditional French media, the TV channel TF1. She explained that she sees TikTok not only as a mean to reach a younger audience but as a way to strengthen the relationship to her existing audience. She treats the same information but in a different way,  freer, funnier. She warns the School of Journalism's students about never compromising on their ethics, their work should be entertaining and informative as well. 

TikTok can also be an amazing platform for young content creator that can express themselves but also inform and be politically active, such as Valeria Sashenok who informs users on the war in her country, Ukraine. She gave her special tips to the audience: "nice quality of video, short and simple titles, trendy music, and above all being confident about what you're writing or saying". She herself uses humor to get attention and entertain but also as a protection from her everyday life in a bombed city. 

Dhanaraj Kheokao, a lawyer and researcher, gave interesting insights about TikTok in Asian countries: which represent 4 out of the 10 countries with the most active users. He studied particularly the success of the platform in Thailand through focus groups, a success explained by “the censorship of an authoritarian regime”, a preference for “watching and listening rather than reading”, the long commuting time and cheaper telecom packages. The media situation on this mature TikTok market is that every news agency has an official account and their reporters have their own accounts as well. Although, he noticed that “young generations are using TikTok as an appetiser”: if they're interested in the topic, they will move to Youtube and if they're further interested, on Google. It might be what will happen in Europe soon enough as well.

Every algorithm has its limits

Some of the guest speakers of this special day took the time to warn the student audience about the dark side of TikTok and they all expressed their interest in cooperating to do more research on the social media algorithm and data. 

Brandi Geurkink, Senior Policy Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, worked on political advertisement on TikTok. Although the platform declared to the European Commission that this kind of ads are simply not allowed, there seems to be some influencers that are indeed illegally paid by political groups. After Mozilla revealed its study on this phenomenon, TikTok introduced a filter to identify ads and declare partnerships, but the technology is simply not labelling correctly the content, as observed by the guest speaker during the German electoral election of 2021.

Guillaume Chaslot, an Ex-Engineer at Google and Founder of AlgoTransparency.org, participated in two major investigations about TikTok algorithms, with the New York Times and with the Wall Street Journal. He compared TikTok to Youtube in the way their common goal is to foster more watch time to get more ad revenue, but because of the short length of TikTok videos, the platform learns faster, 20 to 100 times faster. He defined the engagement that TikTok is seeking as “wasting people's time with a maximum efficiency by its addictive design”, and not “to bring the maximum amount of information in a short time”. That is why it can be hard to be a journalist on the platform compared to an autocrat that will create borderline content, which lead to “dark filter bubbles” that spread quickly, and sometimes deadly. TikTok's AI is definitely not helping democracy and it can also be seen as a ”Trojan horse" by collecting a huge amount of data about young users and delivering it to a non-democratic country. 

Chine Labbé, Editor in chief at Newsguard and graduate of Sciences Po's School of Journalism, also expressed some concerns about the platform. She led a study of six persons to test the social media and discovered two main issues. The scroll problem is the fact that it takes less than 40 minutes for a new subscriber on TikTok to reach misinformation content, because of the poorly filtered and labelling system. The search problem is the fact that 20% of the result of a search request will contain misinformation. Even worse, the autocomplete suggestions are far from neutral and encourage users to search for violent and borderline content. Finally, some users habits, as “algospeak”, are a way to go around censorship by using terms as “ab0rtion”. The young journalist recognises that one of the main difficulty is that most of the moderation is made by an AI, and nothing is better than the human eye to identify misinformation.

All in all, as many new digital tools, TikTok will be what users and journalists will make of it, but it definitely won't solve any problem by itself and one should always keep a critical eye on a social media that is owned by a non-democratic country.

MORE INFORMATION:

• Sciences Po's School of Journalism
• The programme of the New Practices of Journalism 2022 Day