Major Swedish research council grant for study of news on TikTok

Journalism on TikTok is growing rapidly, bringing new opportunities as well as significant challenges. Newsrooms are experimenting with short-form, visual storytelling to reach younger audiences. At the same time, far-right influencers and alternative media actors are increasing their presence on the platform. 

These shifts raise important questions: How do journalists adapt their work to stay relevant? How does TikTok influence what counts as credible news? And what does this mean for how young people interpret information? 

TACTik brings together scholars from University of Gothenburg, Linnaeus University and University of Mainz and is carried out in collaboration with the German Funk Initiative and the Fojo Media Institute. It combines several research methods, including ethnographic studies of TikTok journalists’ creative practices and self-perception, computational analysis of large-scale TikTok video data to identify storytelling patterns and their relationship to truth claims, and biometric analysis paired with interviews to explore how young adults interpret and emotionally respond to news on the platform. 

This innovative methodological approach will help establish a new research agenda on platform-based journalism. By analysing how news is produced and consumed on TikTok, TACTik seeks to deepen our understanding of how information spreads in an increasingly diverse media landscape—an issue that is central to protecting democratic processes.