What happens if teens get their news from TikTok? | Letter

Your editorial on disinformation (17 February) highlights a great challenge, but of arguably greater importance are the sources of news young people use. In a 2022 study, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford provided quantitative evidence on the growth of social media as a news source for 18- to 24-year-olds. TikTok as a source had increased fivefold between 2020 and 2022, and YouTube stabilised its share of young readers in Asia, the fastest growing populace in the world.

As a geography teacher, I regularly ask students how they access news. Sadly, it is now rare that one hand will be raised when I ask about mainstream and unsponsored sources. We have accepted that reading newspapers comes with political and social angles, but social media exacerbates this further by denying broad coverage.