The User Experience of TikTok and Its Compatibility with News

While TikTok is rapidly growing as a source of news for young people, they appear to have limited interest in news from traditional sources on the platform. Exploring whether there is a place for professional news within TikTok, we seek to capture young people’s experience of TikTok in all its complexity. Our non-news centric approach enabled us to identify one overarching experience: temporality – summarized as the ambivalent experience of concurrent enjoyment and retrospective regret - and four interrelated experiential dimensions: spatiality (TikTok as a place to escape to); positionality (being validated by one’s personal feed), non-sociality (relieved from the duty to interact with social contacts), and disembodiment (being “off” for a while). Our results suggest that while there is potential for professional news media to connect with young people on TikTok by providing engaging, valuable and reliable content that fulfils their informational needs – rather than merely entertaining or distracting them – adhering too closely to the “spirit” of TikTok risks diluting the distinctive role professional news media plays for them: being a readily available, dependable source when they need it.